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EDITED BY 



CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER 



$lmmcan a^cn utHttttt^ 



GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 



BY 



EDWARD GARY 







>A 



.o. . 



BOSTON AND NEW YOEK ^ ^ '^ ' ^ 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 

1894 






Copyright, 1894, 
By EDWARD GARY. 

All rights reserved. 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., V. S. A. 
Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Company. 



TO 

'MRS. FRANCIS GEORGE SHAW 

THIS LIFE OF OUR DEAR FRIEND 

IS, WITH RESPECT AND AFFECTION 

DEDICATED 

BY THE AUTHOR 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

CHAPTER I. 
Family and Youth 1 



CHAPTER II. 
Emerson and Brook Farm ,15 

CHAPTER in. 
European Travel 39 

CHAPTER IV. 
The Literary Field 52 

CHAPTER V. 
The Howadji Books 59 

CHAPTER VI. 
Lecturer and Magazine Writer 74 

CHAPTER Vn. 
" The Potiphar Papers ; " " Prue and I " 91 

CHAPTER VIII. 
Business Experiences 104 

CHAPTER IX. 
The Campaign of 1856 . 109 

CHAPTER X. 
A Novel and a Lecture » . , . 118 



• • • 



Vlll CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER XL 

The Eve of the War o » = « . . 130 

CHAPTER XII. 
In the Midst of War 146 

CHAPTER XIII. 
Editor of "Harper's Weekly" , . 168 

CHAPTER XIV. 
The End of the War 183 

CHAPTER XV. 
Four Years of Politics 194 

CHAPTER XVI. 
The Reform Commission « 216 

CHAPTER XVII. 
The Greeley Canvass 2^7 

CHAPTER XVIII. 
The Reaction — 1874 to 1876 239 

CHAPTER XIX. 
The Parting of the Ways 253 

CHAPTER XX. 
Political Independence 262 

CHAPTER XXI. 
The Canvass of 1884 279 

CHAPTER XXII. 
The Leader of Reform 294 



CONTENTS. IX 

CHAPTER XXIII. 
The Typical Independent 308 

CHAPTER XXIV. 
Chancellob of the University 317 

CHAPTER XXV. 
Conclusion 322 



GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 



CHAPTER I. 

FAMILY AND YOUTH. 

The " Elizabeth and Ann " sailed from the port 
of London on the 6th of May, 1635, for New- 
England. In Hotten's "List of Emigrants to 
America"^ the names and ages of her seven 
"passingers" are given, and it is stated that they 
" brought certificates from the Ministers where 
their abodes were, and from the Justices of Peace, 
of their conform itie to the orders and discipline 
of the Church of England, and y* they are no sub- 
sidy men." It is added that they had taken the 
oaths of allegiance and supremacy. Of these 
names the last is that of Henry Curtis, and his age 

^ " (Regi)ster of the names of all ye Passingers wcli Passed 
from ye Port of London for on whole year Ending-e X mas 1635. 

6 May 1635. 
Theis under- written names are to be transported to New Eng- 
land, imbarqued in the Elizabeth and Ann, Roger Coop (Cooper) 
Mr. the p-ties have brought Cert : from the Ministers where their 
abodes were and from the Justices of Peace of their conformitie 
to the orders and discipline of the Church of England and yt they 
are no subsidy men. They have taken the oaths of alleg : and 
Suprem : " 



2 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

is given as twenty-seven. This was the founder of 
the family ^ of which George William Curtis was a 
descendant in the sixth generation. Henry Curtis ^ 
settled at Watertown, in Massachusetts, having had 
five " lots " granted to him, and having bought two. 
Later he removed to Sudbury, where his eldest 
son, Ephraim, was born in 1642, he having mar- 
ried Mary Guy, the daughter of Nicholas Guy, a 
carpenter who had emigrated from Upton Gray, 
near Southampton, England. Ephraim appears 
in the colonial history of his time as a man of en- 
ergy, courage, and a strong will. In 1675, when 
he was thirty-three years old, it is recorded of 
him that, because he was " noted for his intimate 

1 The genealogy of Mr. Curtis, as traced by his son, is as 
follows : — 

CURTIS. BURRILL. 

Henry-Mary Guy George 

1608-1678 1630-1683 

Ephraim John-Lois Ivory 

1642-1734 1651-1703 

John-Rebekah Waites Ebenezer-Martha Farrington 

1731-1768 1701-1778 

David-Susanna Stone James-Elizabeth Rawson 

1763-1813 1743-1825 
George-Mary Elizabeth Burril James-Sally Arnold 

1796-1856 1772-1820 

George William Mary Elizabeth 

1824-1892 1798-1826 

^ James Savage, in his Genealogical Dictionary of the First Set- 
tlers of New England, showing Three Generations, notes (vol. i. 
p. 485) : *' Curtis, Henry, Watertown 1636, an orig. propr. of 
Sudbury, m. Mary, d. of Nicholas Guy, had Ephraim, b. 31 Mai., 
1643; John, 1644 ; & Joseph, 1747; nam. in their gr.mo's will 
1666 ; & d. 8 May 1678." 



FAMILY AND YOUTH. 6 

knowledge of the country, his quickness of compre- 
hension and cool courage, and his large acquaint- 
ance with the Indians, whose language he spoke flu- 
ently," the court sent him as an interpreter with 
an embassy which started from Cambridge, July 
28, with an escort of twenty men under Captains 
Edward Hutchinson and Thomas Wheeler. On 
the 2d of August they were attacked from am- 
bush. Eight of the little force were killed and 
five were wounded. The remainder took refuge 
in a house in Brookfield, and Ephraim Curtis, 
with a companion, was sent toward the nearest 
post to report their plight and secure relief. He 
returned before leaving the town, having learned 
that the Indians were in force and intended a 
night attack. A second time he " readily as- 
sented to adventure forth again on that service " 
alone, his companion having been killed meanwhile. 
Again he was forced to return. " But towards 
morning," says Captain Wheeler, " said Ephraim 
adventured forth for the third time, and was fain 
to creep on his hands and knees for some space 
of ground, that he might not be discerned by the 
enemy. But by God's mercy, he escaped their 
hands and got safely to Marlborough, tho' very 
much spent and ready to faint by reason of 
want of sleep before he left us, and his sore 
travel night and day in the hot season till he got 
thither." For his gallant services in this year he 
was made a lieutenant, accredited as in the *^ direct 
service " of the council, paid the sum of " 2X," 



4 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

and given the right to gather the corn of "our 
enemies, the Indians that are fled." Later in the 
year the English were withdrawn from Worcester, 
the place was burned, and Lieutenant Curtis re- 
turned to Sudbury. 

He had been the first settler of Worcester. 
Indeed, he was so emphatically the first, and was 
so solidly settled, that when a committee of the 
General Court visited the place to lay out a town 
there, they found Ephraim Curtis established, and 
so resolved to assert his rights that it took ex- 
tended legal proceedings, all of which are recorded 
in the quaint language of the time, to dislodge him. 
Nor was this finally accomplished until there had 
been made over to him other lands, which seem, by 
the description of them, to have been compensation 
in ample measure for those which his enterprise 
had laid hold upon. I have said this much of the 
life of Ephraim Curtis, because he is the only one 
of the earliest members of the family of whom 
there is a clear record, and because it makes plain 
the nature of the stock from which George Wil- 
liam Curtis was derived. It was not the usual 
Puritan or Pilgrim type, but apparently that of 
the smaller gentry of England, whose " conformitie 
to the orders and discipline of the Church of Eng- 
land " was duly acknowledged, and who were " no 
subsidy men." The men of this class had inde- 
pendence and self-reliance in plenty ; were full of 
resource, quick of wit, eager to seize every oppor- 
tunity ; resolute, even daring ; faithful to duty, — 



FAMILY AND YOUTH. 5 

good as friends, formidable as foes. It was a good 
stock. In the life of George William Curtis some 
of these qualities will reappear ; and if they are not 
generally associated with his name by his contem- 
poraries, it is because in part they were rendered 
less prominent by the radiance of gentler and rarer 
qualities ; but, as will I hope be seen, the better of 
them were not absent, and in the phrase of the 
physiologist " persisted," and were very strong. 

One other figure in the Curtis family attracts 
attention, — that of John Curtis, the eldest son of 
Ephraim. He was born (1707) in Worcester, and 
up to the outbreak of the Revolution was an active 
and noted citizen, — selectman, surveyor of the 
highways, captain in the French and Indian War. 
He was also a tavern-keeper and a leading member 
of the church, and his house was much frequented 
by the clergymen of the day. But he was a sturdy 
and open loyalist. In 1774 he signed a protest 
against what he regarded as the revolutionary action 
of the town, whereupon the town, premising that he 
was one of those on whom it had " Conferred many 
favours and Consequently might expect their Kind- 
est and best Services," resolved that he and his fel- 
low-signers be " Deemed unworthy of holding any 
Town office of Profit or Honour until they have 
made satisfaction for this offence to the acceptance 
of the town which ought to be made as public as 
their Protest was." He declined at this time to 
make any retraction, and in the next year he was 
declared a public enemy, disarmed, and forbidden 



6 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

to leave the town. But in 1777 he seems to have 
made his peace, as it was voted to receive him and 
others "into the Town's favour, and that further 
prosecution against them as enemies of the United 
States of America shall cease, they paying the 
costs that has arisen already by means of their 
being prosecuted as Enemies to the United States, 
agreeable to their petition." Here was a strain of 
practical independence in the Curtis blood not in- 
consistent with a disposition to make the best of 
facts that could not be changed. 

The great-grandson of this John Curtis was 
George Curtis, the father of George William. He 
was born in Worcester in 1796, but removed to 
Providence, R. I. There he married Mary Eliza- 
beth Burrill, daughter of James Burrill, Jr., who 
was Chief Justice of Rhode Island, and at one time 
a member of the United States Senate from that 
State, an opponent of the Missouri Compromise, 
and a man of marked ability and high character. 
Of this marriage were born James Burrill Curtis, 
in 1822, and George William Curtis, February 24, 
1824. Mrs. Curtis died in 1826 when George was 
but two years old. In 1835 Mr. Curtis married, as 
his second wife, a daughter of Samuel W. Bridg- 
ham, of Providence. Of Mr. Curtis his eldest son 
(now living in England) writes that he was of 
" high integrity, sound, practical judgment, and ex- 
cellent business talents, together with political and 
literary taste. He was popular among his associ- 
ates — leading business and professional men — 



FAMILY AND YOUTH, 1 

in Providence and New York. He was most affec- 
tionate and beloved in his family, and extremely 
kind and indulgent to his children, though sharp 
and severe in his demands as to manners and 
morals. He valued truthfulness and honesty above 
all other qualities, and his example and influence 
in these respects early impressed both George and 
me very deeply. In a letter of 1860 George, reply- 
ing to a question of mine about his religious views, 
writes thus (the italics are George's) : ' I believe 
in God, who is love ; that all men are brothers ; 
and that the only essential duty of every man is 
to be honesty by which I understand his absolute 
following of his conscience when duly enlightened. 
I do not believe that God is anxious that men 
should believe this or that theory of the Godhead, 
or of the Divine Government, but that they should 
live purely, justly, and lovingly.' These, I take it, 
were the essential articles of his creed to the end ; 
and, whatever may be thought of them, at least 
the paramount value, or his estimation, of honesty 
and practical goodness, is conspicuous." 
- To this instructive glimpse of the influence of 
the father I am happily able to add one equally in- 
structive, from the same source, as to the influence 
of the second mother. Mr. J. B. Curtis writes 
of her : '" She was a woman of much good sense 
and practical energy, of strong and generous sym- 
pathies, and of high public spirit and piety ; and 
she added to these things literary cultivation de- 
cidedly above the average. She wrote with ease, 



8 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

whether in letters or other compositions, a full, 
graceful, flowing, delightful English style. She 
once wrote to us in high girlish spirits that she be- 
lieved she loved her ready-made children the best. 
Certainly she made herself to a very unusual de- 
gree our intimate friend and companion, becoming 
mother and sister (we never had an actual sister) 
in one ; and she was thus able to encourage in 
George and me, in the most genial and natural 
way, everything that was good." 

From the age of six to that of eleven, George, 
with his elder brother, attended the school of C. W. 
Greene at Jamaica Plain, near Boston ; but on 
his father's second marriage he was brought again 
to Providence and placed in school there, until he 
was fifteen, when (1839) his father removed to 
New York. Of the school days at Jamaica Plain 
I know nothing save that they left pleasant and 
tender memories, and furnished some of the detail 
for the earlier chapters of "Trumps.'' There is 
in " Sea from Shore," one of the chapters of " Prue 
and I," a picture of the Providence wharves that 
is worth citing for its delightful local color, and 
its suggestion of the influence of the seaside town 
and of the sensitiveness of the boyish mind : — 

" My earliest remembrances are of a long range 
of old, half -dilapidated stores ; red-brick stores with 
steep wooden roofs and stone window-frames and 
door-frames, which stood upon docks built as if 
for immense trade with all quarters of the globe. 

" Generally there were only a few sloops moored 



FAMILY AND YOUTH. 9 

to the tremendous posts, which I fancied could 
easily hold fast a Spanish Armada in a tropical 
hurricane. But sometimes a great ship, an East 
Indiaman, with rusty, seamed, blistered sides and 
dingy sails, came slowly moving up the harbor, 
with an air of indolent self-importance and con- 
sciousness of superiority, which inspired me with 
profound respect. If the ship had ever chanced to 
run down a row-boat, or a sloop, or any specimen 
of smaller craft, I should only have wondered at 
the temerity of any floating thing in crossing the 
path of such supreme majesty. The ship was leis- 
urely chained and cabled to the old dock, and then 
came the disemboweling. Long after the confu- 
sion of unloading was over, and the ship lay as 
if all voyages were ended, I dared to creep timor- 
ously along the edge of the dock, and, at great risk 
of falling in the black water of its huge shadow, I 
placed my hand upon the hot hulk, and so estab- 
lished a mystic and exquisite connection with Pa- 
cific Islands ; with palm groves and all the passion- 
ate beauties they embower ; with jungles, Bengal 
tigers, pepper, and the crushed feet of Chinese fair- 
ies. I touched Asia, the Cape of Good Hope, and 
the Happy Islands, I would not believe that the 
heat I felt was of our Northern sun ; to my finer 
sympathy, it burned with equatorial fervor, 

" The freight was piled in the old stores. I be- 
lieve that many of them remain, but they have 
lost their character. When I knew them, not only 
was I younger, but partial decay had overtaken 



10 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

the town ; at least the bulk of its India trade had 
drifted to New York and Boston. But the appli- 
ances remained. There was no throng of busy 
traffickers ; and after school, in the afternoon, I 
strolled by and gazed into the solemn interiors. 

" Silence reigned within, — silence, dimness, and 
piles of foreign treasures. Vast coils of cable, like 
tame boa-constrictors, served as seats for men with 
large stomachs and heavy watch-seals, and nankeen 
trousers, who sat looking out of the door toward 
the ships, with little other sign of life than an 
occasional low talking, as if in their sleep. Huge 
hogsheads, perspiring brown sugar, and oozing slow 
molasses, as if nothing tropical could keep within 
bounds, but must continuously expand and exude 
and overflow, stood against the walls, and had an 
architectural significance, for they darkly reminded 
me of Egyptian prints, and in the duskiness of 
the low-vaulted store seemed cyclopean columns 
incomplete. Strange festoons and heaps of bags ; 
square piles of boxes cased in mats, bales of airy 
summer stuffs which even in winter scoffed at 
cold, and shamed it by audacious assumption of 
eternal sun ; little specimen boxes of precious dyes, 
that even now shine through my memory like old 
Venetian schools unpainted, — these were all there 
in rich confusion. 

"The stores had a twilight of dimness; the air 
was spicy with mingled odors. I liked to look 
suddenly in from the glare of sunlight outside, and 
then the cool sweet dimness was like the palpable 



FAMILY AND YOUTH, 11 

breath of the far-off island groves ; and if only- 
some parrot or macaw hung within would flaunt 
with glistening plumage in his cage, and, as the 
gay hue flashed in a chance sunbeam, call in his 
hard, shrill voice, as if thrusting sharp sounds upon 
a glistening wire from out that grateful gloom, then 
the enchantment was complete, and without mov- 
ing I was circumnavigating the globe. 

"From the old stores and the docks slowly 
crumbling, touched, I knew not why or how, by 
the pensive air of past prosperity, I rambled out of 
town on those well-remembered afternoons to the 
fields that lay upon hillsides over the harbor, and 
there sat looking out to sea, fancying some distant 
sail, proceeding to the glorious ends of the earth, to 
be my type and image, who would so sail, stately 
and successful, to all the glorious ports of the Fu- 
ture." 

These are passages both of memory and imagi- 
nation, and date fifteen years later than the life to 
which they relate. But the memories of a man of 
thirty are not dim, and the imagination owns the 
spell of memory when it plays upon the time of 
boyhood. I take the picture to be a true one. 

In these early days, and until Curtis was twenty- 
five years old, there was one person whose influence, 
strong and continuous and intimate, was always re- 
membered as " a great debt," — his brother Burrill. 
During this quarter of a century, and for more than 
a third of Mr. Curtis's life, they were constantly to- 
gether, occupying the same room at home, at school, 



12 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

at Brook Farm, at Concord, and during much of 
the journeying abroad. He is the model from 
which was drawn the portrait of '' Our Cousin the 
Curate " in " Prue and I." It does not concern me 
or my readers to know how far the story embraced 
in that sketch is based on the brothers' experience, 
but it will throw light on the springtime of Mr. 
Curtis's life, when the sap coursed free and strong 
and the force and direction of aftergrowth were 
being determined, to cite here a few passages from 
the sketch : — 

" There is no subject which does not seem to lead 
naturally to our Cousin the Curate. As the soft 
air steals in and envelops everything in the world, 
so that the trees and the hills and the rivers, the 
cities, the crops, and the sea, are made remote and 
delicate and beautiful by its pure baptism, so over 
all the events of our little lives, comforting, refin- 
ing, and elevating, falls like a benediction the re- 
membrance of our cousin the curate. 

" He was my only early companion. He had no 
brother, I had none, and we became brothers to 
each other. He was alwavs beautiful. His face 
was symmetrical and delicate ; his figure was slight 
and graceful. He looked as the sons of kings ought 
to look, — as I am sure Philip Sidney looked when 
he was a boy. His eyes were blue, and as you looked 
at them they seemed to let you gaze out into a 
June heaven. The blood ran close to the skin, and 
his complexion had the rich transparency of light. 
There was nothing gross or heavy in his expression 



FAMILY AND YOUTH, 13 

or texture ; his soul seemed to have mastered his 
body. But he had strong passions, for his delicacy- 
was positive, not negative; it was not weakness, 
but intensity. 

" Often, when I returned panting and restless 
from some frolic which had wasted almost all the 
night, I was rebuked as I entered the room in 
which he lay peacefully sleeping. There was some- 
thing holy in the profound repose of his beauty ; 
and as I stood looking at him, how many a time 
the tears have dropped from my hot eyes upon his 
face, while I vowed to make myself worthy of such 
a companion ! for I felt my heart owning its alle- 
giance to that strong and imperial nature. 

" My cousin was loved by the boys, but the girls 
worshiped him. His mind, large in grasp and 
subtle in perception, naturally commanded his com- 
panions, while the lustre of his character allured 
those who could not understand him. The asceti- 
cism occasionally showed itself a vein of hardness, 
or rather of severity, in his treatment of others. 
He did what he thought it his duty to do, but he 
forgot that few could see the right so closely as he, 
and very few of those few could so calmly obey the 
least command of conscience. I confess I was a 
little afraid of him, for I think I never could be 
severe. 

" In the long winter evenings I often read to 
Prue the story of some old father of the church, or 
some quaint poem of George Herbert's ; and every 
Christmas Eve I read to her Milton's ' Hymn on the 



14 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

Nativity.' Yet when the saint seems to us most 
saintly, or the poem most pathetic or sublime, we 
find ourselves talking of our cousin the curate. I 
have not seen him for many years ; but when we 
parted, his head had the intellectual symmetry of 
Milton's, without the Puritanic stoop, and with the 
stately grace of a cavalier." 



CHAPTEK II. 

EMERSON AND BROOK FARM. 

With the evidence afforded in the passages 
quoted in the last chapter, written some six years 
after parting with his brother in Europe, of the 
place that brother held in his heart and life, I ven- 
ture to give some notes by Mr. Burrill Curtis of 
their life together from 1835, when they returned 
from school to Providence, to 1846, when they 
sailed for Europe : — 

" Not long after (1835), another powerful* in- 
fluence reached us, which prevailed in our lives for 
seven or eight years. This was the influence of 
E. W. Emerson. It was then first beginning to 
extend itself in New England, and not only the 
United States, but Great Britain also, have since 
become indebted to it. He was the sympathizing 
leader and moderating patron, so to speak, of that 
ferment and stir after all kinds of reform which, 
according to his own account, had taken possession 
of so many men and women around him from 
about the year 1820 onward. His large endow- 
ment of cheerful humor, of intellectual acuteness, 
and of sober common-sense did not prevent his 
holding persistently aloft, in an exceptional degree, 
the torch of the ideal in everything ; and though 



16 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

liis thought was usually characterized by profun- 
dity, comprehensiveness, and severe balance, — al- 
beit it was often too fine-spun and mystical, — he 
was so sanguine, and so optimistically enamored of 
his ideals, as not unfrequently to overlook the ex- 
orbitancy and impracticability of some of them. 
He was an ardent apostle of *^ liberty ' even to the 
apparent obeying of one's ' whims ; ' but he was 
an equally ardent and strenuous apostle of ' law ' 
in its highest or most stringent senses. Nature's 
law (which includes the moral law) ordains lib- 
erty, it is true, but it ordains the ' regulation ' of 
liberty also; and while Emerson stands on the 
one hand stoutly for freedom, independence, self- 
reliance, heroism, — nay, even inconsistency and 
nonconformity, — he stands on the other hand as 
piously and immovably, like a rapt saint, for obedi- 
ence to natural and moral law. Our coming into 
contact with this New England ' movement ' (called 
in our time ' Transcendentalism '), and especially 
with its leader and moderator, proved to be the 
cardinal event of our youth ; and I cannot but 
think that the seed then sown took such deep root 
as to flower continuously in our later years, and 
make us both the confirmed ' Independents ' that 
we were and are, whilst fully conscious at the same 
time of the obligation of living in all possible har- 
mony with our fellows, 

" I still recall the impressions produced by Em- 
erson's delivery of his address on the ' Over-Soul ' 
in Mr. Hartshorn's semicircular school -room in 



EMERSON AND BROOK FARM. 17 

Providence, our native town. He seemed to speak 
as an inhabitant of heaven, and with the inspiration 
and authority of a prophet. Although a large part 
of the matter of that discourse, when reduced to its 
lowest terms, does not greatly differ from the com- 
monplaces of piety and religion, yet its form and 
its tone were so fresh and vivid that they made 
the matter also seem to be uttered for the first 
time, and to be a direct outcome from the inmost 
source of the highest truth. We heard Emerson 
lecture frequently, and made his personal acquaint- 
ance. My enthusiastic admiration of him and his 
writings soon mounted to a high and intense ' hero- 
worship,' which, when it subsided, seems to have 
left me ever since incapable of attaching myseH as 
a follower to any other man. How far George 
shared such feelings, if at all, I cannot precisely 
say ; but he so far shared my enthusiastic admira- 
tion as to be led a willing captive to Emerson's 
attractions, and to the incidental attractions of the 
movement of which he was the head ; and Emerson 
always continued to command from us both the 
sincerest reverence and homage. 

" I do not remember that George ever commit- 
ted himself to any important extravagance of ' re- 
form.' I, for my part, was at first carried away 
into personal experiments of disusing money and 
animal food ; but I was soon convinced of my 
errors and abandoned them. Comparatively unim- 
portant vagaries about dress we both partook of. 
The ' movement ' affected and modified our aims 



18 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

and ideas in various respects as individuals, but 
did not enlist us as permanent and well-drilled 
soldiers in social schemes and causes. It awakened 
our interest in the reforming ideas of others around 
us ; but neither the anti-slavery cause (which af ter- 
w^ards aroused in George an heroic zeal and devo- 
tion), nor the temperance cause, nor any other, 
however apparently important, then secured from 
us anything more than a reasonable speculative 
consideration. We were intent mainly, not on re- 
forming others, or reforming society at large, but 
on the ordering of our own individual lives." 

In 1839, when George was fifteen, his father re- 
moved from Providence to New York, and became 
connected with the Bank of Commerce, first as 
cashier and afterwards as president. His home 
was on the north side of Washington Place, then 
the centre of the most desirable residence quarter 
of the city. It is a pleasure to note that the fine 
old house has remained for more than half a cen- 
tury in the Curtis family, and is one of the few in 
which has been amassed a fund of those associa- 
tions, glad or sad, but with the lapse of time always 
and uniquely sweet, which make a house, in a far 
deeper than the technical sense, " real " estate. 
Mr. George Curtis, by his personal qualities, tastes, 
and attainments, as by his business relations and 
ability, became naturally a member of what was in 
truth, if not by its own claim, the best society of 
the city of that time, and in this society both he 
and his wife were fitted to get and to give the best. 



EMERSON AND BROOK FARM. 19 

They were members, first, of Dr. Orville Dewey's 
Unitarian congregation, and afterwards of that of 
Dr. Bellows. Young Curtis was surrounded by 
influences that awakened and developed in him the 
remarkable social gifts which afterwards distin- 
guished him, and trained his active and adventur- 
ous mind in healthy ways. I do not learn much of 
the details of his life at this time, further than that 
he devoted a good deal of time to study at home, 
partly under the guidance of tutors, partly under 
that of his father and mother, and that there was a 
brief experience in the counting-room of a German 
importing and shipping house, which was abandoned, 
for w^hat reason I cannot say, but with happy result. 
Mr. Burrill Curtis writes : " As I, while at col- 
lege, had fallen so much under the influence of 
the New England ' Transcendental Movement ' as 
to have been led by it into a practical vagary about 
money and its use, it was probably something of a 
relief to our father that, a while after my having 
come to my senses, George and I proposed nothing 
worse than to become boarders, and boarders only, 
with the Community at Brook Farm." This was in 
1842, and about two years were passed by the bro- 
thers at West Roxbury, — for George, the years from 
eighteen to twenty. As he and his brother were 
" boarders, and boarders only," it is hardly worth 
while to describe here the purposes of the founders 
of this peculiar home. Mr. Emerson, in his " His- 
toric Notes of Life and Letters in New England," 
sums them up sufficiently : — 



20 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

" The founders of Brook Farm should have this 
praise, that they made what all people try to make, 
an agreeable place to live in. All comers, even the 
most fastidious, found it the pleasantest of resi- 
dences. It is certain that freedom from household 
routine, variety of character and talent, variety of 
work, variety of means of thought and instruction, 
art, music, poetry, reading, masquerade, did not per- 
mit sluggishness or despondency, broke up routine. 
There is agreement in the testimony that it was, to 
most of the associates, education ; to many the most 
important period of their life, the birth of valued 
friendships, their first acquaintance with the riches 
of conversation, their training in behavior. The 
art of letter-writing, it is said, was immensely cul- 
tivated ; letters were always flying, not only from 
house to house, but from room to room. It was a 
perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an 
Age of Reason in a patty-pan." 

Unfortunately, Mr. Emerson, like many smaller 
men, was not wholly free from the temptation of 
phrase-making, and the last sentence is more amus- 
ing than clear. So far as I can trace the influence 
of the life at Brook Farm on young Curtis, he es- 
caped pretty well the element of the " French Revo- 
lution " and the " Age of Reason," unquestionably 
made close and valuable friendships, and had (as 
well as contributed) his full share of the " picnic." 
I find that he studied, with apparently much appli- 
cation, German, agricultural chemistry, and music, 
the last with great zest under the instruction of Mr. 



EMERSON AND BROOK FARM. 21 

John Dwight. In June, 1843, his second year, he 
wrote to his father : — 

" My life is summery enough. We breakfast at 
six and from seven to twelve I am at work. After 
dinner, these fair days permit no homage but to 
their beauty, and I am fain to woo their smiles in 
the shades and sunlights of the woods. A festal life 
for one before whom the great sea stretches which 
must be sailed; yet this summer air teaches life- 
navigation, and I listen to the flowing streams, and 
to the cool rush of the winds among the trees, with 
an increase of that hope which is the only pole-star 
of life." 

This expresses, I should say, the spirit of the 
youth. It was essentially earnest in its main mo- 
tive, and was not inconsistent with the utmost de- 
light in the pleasures that presented themselves, or 
that were to be had for the seeking. He had a 
most pleasing voice, and a face and form of exqui- 
site beauty, and I read of his singing lingering in 
the memory of his companions thirty years later, 
and of equally vivid recollections of his personal 
charm. One chronicler recalls a " masquerade pic- 
nic in the woods," — " We were thrown into con- 
vulsions of laughter at the sight of G. W. C. 
dressed as Fanny Elssler, making courtesies and 
pirouetting down the path ; " and another occasion 
when he " led the quadrille as Hamlet, and looked 
' the Dane ' to the life." 

A lady who was a resident at Brook Farm, and 
whose friendship then formed lasted through the 



22 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

life of Curtis, furnislies some notes as to that 
time tliat confirm the impression I have indicated. 
She recalls one " bright May morning " when, 
going from the " Eyrie " to the " Hive " for break- 
fast, she approached the "gate through which 
George Bradford and the fascinating Hawthorne " 
were wont to drive the cows. The gate was " held 
wide open by our handsome young man, Charles A. 
Dana, who did himself proud at such honors, not 
having the certain reserve and diffidence that many 
of our Brook Farm men had. . . . With C. A. D. 
were two young men who, as I remember them, 
looked like young Greek gods. ' These must be the 
Curtises,' I thought, ' two wonderfully charming 
young men ' of whom Mr. Ripley had spoken. 

" Burrill, the elder, with a typical Greek face and 
long hair falling to his shoulders in irregular curls, 
I remember as most unconscious of himself, inter- 
ested in all about him, talking of the Greek philoso- 
phers as if he had just come from one of Socrates' 
walks, carrying the high philosophy into his daily 
life ; helping the young people with hard arithmetic 
lessons ; trimming the lamps daily at the Eyrie, 
where the brothers came to live (my sister saw 
George assisting him one day, and occasionally, she 
says, he turned his face with a disgusted expression, 
trying to puff away the disagreeable odor) ; never 
losing control of himself, with the kindest man- 
ner to every person. He and George seemed very 
companionable and fond of each other. 

" George, though only eighteen, — one year older 



EMERSON AND BROOK FARM, 23 

than I, — seemed much older, like a man of twenty- 
five possibly, with a peculiar elegance, if I may 
so express it; great and admirable attention, as I 
recollect, when listening to any one ; courteous rec- 
ognition of others' convictions and even prejudices ; 
and never a personal animosity of any kind, — 
a certain remoteness of manner, however, that I 
think prevented persons from becoming acquainted 
with him as easily as with Burrill. 

" George and Mr. Bradford, on cold, stormy wash- 
ing days in winter, used to wrap themselves as 
warmly as possible, and insisted on hanging out 
the clothes for the women, — a chivalry equal to 
that of Walter Raleigh throwing down his cloak 
before the Queen Elizabeth." 

This lady speaks also of the part taken by George 
Curtis in the gayeties of the place, and the charm 
he lent them. I find in one of his own letters, 
written a few years after leaving Roxbury, a remi- 
niscence of Brook Farm that shows the impression 
made by some of the characters there. He speaks 
of "the solemn sphynx, Alcott, dispensing his 

great discourse on one of his visitations with L , 

his solemn shadow, to Brook Farm, when he held 
a talk in the dreary Morton House one glorious 
June evening. It was as stately and inhuman as 
if there had been no stars shining, and Carrie S. 
and I slipped out of one of the long windows and 
went to walk. It is a great pity that Mr. Alcott 
is too old to learn that the condition of the King- 
dom is, not the being a grave philosopher, but a 



24 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

little child. Yet he always has about him the 
grandeur you would predict of his brow and eye, 
the solitary old sphynx grandeur of the desert." 

I add the following reference, in a letter to his 
father, to Webster and his oration at Bunker Hill 
in June, 1843, partly because a good sign of what 
a boy of nineteen has in him is what he finds in 
others, and partly because these extracts show the 
fine and fruitful sympathy between young Curtis 
and his father : — 

''I was sorry not to see you on the day we 
watched eagerly the coming of the ' Sons of New 
England from New York,' when they were march- 
ing to the Common to form. The day was a fine 
one to me. Finest of all, that I saw and heard 
Daniel Webster. We struggled through the 
crowd, and stood only a rod or two in front of 
him, saw him plainly, heard him distinctly. It 
was a noble spectacle. As far on one side as the 
eye could reach up the hill was a silent multitude, 
out of whose midst, solemnly and lonely against 
the sky, rose the monument. On the other stood 
this man solemn and lonely also, the strength of 
Olympian Jove in his figure and mein, yet a wild, 
lonely spectacle. Too great for party, not yet 
great enough for quiet independence. Not the 
calm dignity of a soul self-centred who rules the 
world, but the restless grandeur of a Titan storm- 
ing heaven. His mouth curled, his eye flashed, as 
if among that mass he was king, but the higher 
crown could not be seen upon him. Though by 



EMERSON AND BROOK FARM. 25 

no means satisfying my idea of a great man, he is 
certainly a strong man, — Hercules, if not Apollo." 

Brook Farm was notoriously the home of re- 
formers. A lad as warm-hearted, eager, and imag- 
inative as Curtis might easily have been unsettled 
and warped by them. That he was not is shown 
in the following passages from still another letter 
to his father, in which that keen guardian of san- 
ity, a sense of humor, shines lightly : — 

'' Dear Father, — Will you send me $20 to pay 
for a coat which I have had made in Boston ? You 
will smile at such a request after my unmitigated 
condemnation of coats and resolute tunic-wearing 
in Providence last summer ; yet had you taken apart- 
ments in my mind since then, and closely observed 
all changes and growths that occurred, you would 
see how natural it is. The stern protest, which dis- 
tinguishes the birth of reform, against society, the 
church, and all things but the sovereign /, gradually 
gives way to that other better state of affirmation 
and reception which, deserting the faith not a whit, 
leads an outward life in beautiful harmony with all 
men and things ! ' What was done before,' says 
Fenelon, ' to gratify the lusts and vanities of the 
man is now done for the glory of God.' No wise 
man is long a reformer, for Wisdom sees plainly 
that growth is steady, sure, and neither condemns 
nor rejects what is, or has been. Reform is organ- 
ized distrust. It says to the universe fresh from 
God's hand, ' You are a miserable business ; lo ! 
I will make you fairer ! ' and so deputes some 



26 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

Fourier or Robert Owen to improve the bungling 
work of the Creator." After a couple of pages of 
this elaborate badinage, the youngster concludes : 
" From such brief hints, possibly some time to be 
expanded as more light flows in, you may get dim 
glimpses at my position, and so perhaps not alto- 
gether smiling, send me $20." 

The importance of the Brook Farm episode in 
Curtis's life may very easily be exaggerated, and 
I think has been so in the minds of some who 
have written of him. The fame, not to say the 
notoriety, of the place and the persons associated 
with it made a strong impression, though a vague 
one; and it is almost unavoidable that any one 
even indirectly engaged in the " movement " should 
have borne a more or less distinct mark of it in 
the public mind, and not wholly to his advantage, 
since it suggests a strain of '^ queerness." I very 
well recall the conviction of a man of strong na- 
ture, in general sympathy with Mr. Curtis in his 
mature years, who accounted for the views of the 
latter on the rights of women by the theory that 
" there must be a screw loose somewhere in a 
man who graduated from that lunatic school at 
Brook Farm." It is true that Mr. Ripley, the 
very father of the scheme, became one of the 
broadest, sanest, and most just of literary crit- 
ics ; that Mr. Dana, who was a very active coad- 
jutor of Mr. Ripley, became a famous journalist, 
whose acute and trained scholarship was coupled 
with qualities not at all suggestive of fanaticism. 



EMERSON AND BROOK FARM. 27 

and whose aims were the opposite of visionary or 
Utopian. Unquestionably Curtis was influenced 
strongly by the experience of those two years ; he 
must have been a very dull boy had he not been ; 
and what that influence was, in part, is described 
in the lines of Uhland's Song, of which he was 
fond : — 

" What mormng" dreams reveal to me 
The evening makes forever true." 

There was much in the generous confidence, the 
courageous hope, the high aspiration, and the fine 
assertion of the right and duty of individuality 
of the leaders at Brook Farm with which Curtis 
remained in intimate sympathy all his life ; and 
he had no less true appreciation of it, but one all 
the more true, because he saw the comical side of 
the experience and enjoyed it. 

In one of the Easy Chair essays, Mr. Curtis 
wrote of Brook Farm a propos of a passage in 
Hawthorne's "Note-Book:" "The society at Brook 
Farm was composed of every kind of person. 
There were the ripest scholars, men and women 
of the most aesthetic culture and accomplishment, 
young farmers, seamstresses, mechanics, preachers, 
the industrious, the lazy, the conceited, the senti- 
mental. But they associated in such a spirit, and 
under such conditions, that, with some extrava- 
gance, the best of everybody appeared, and there 
was a kind of high esprit de corps^ at least in 
the earlier or golden age of the colony. There 
was plenty of steady, essential, hard work, for the 



28 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

founding of an earthly paradise upon a New 
England farm is no pastime. But with the best 
intention, and much practical knowledge and in- 
dustry and devotion, there was in the nature of the 
case an inevitable lack of method, and economi- 
cal failure was almost a foregone conclusion. But 
there were never such witty potato patches, and 
such sparkling corn-fields before or since. The 
weeds were scratched out of the ground to the 
music of Tennyson or Browning, and the nooning 
was an hour as gay and bright as any brilliant 
midnight at Ambrose's. 

" Compared with other efforts upon which time 
and money and industry are lavished, measured 
by Colorado and Nevada speculations, by Califor- 
nia gold - washing, by oil -boring and the stock 
exchange, Brook Farm was certainly a very rea- 
sonable and practical enterprise, worthy of the 
hope and aid of generous men and women. The 
friendships that were formed there were enduring. 
The devotion to noble endeavor, the sympathy 
with what is most useful to men, the kind pa- 
tience and constant charity that were fostered 
there, have been no more lost than grain dropped 
upon the field. . . . The spirit that was concen- 
trated at Brook Farm is diffused, but not lost. 
As an organized effort, after many downward 
changes, it failed; but those who remember the 
Hive, the Eyrie, the Cottage, when Margaret 
Fuller came and talked, radiant with bright 
humor, — when Emerson and Parker and Hedge 



EMERSON AND BROOK FARM, 29 

joined the circle for a night or day ; when those 
who may not be named publicly brought beauty 
and wit and social sympathy to the feast ; when 
the practical possibilities of life seemed fairer, and 
life and character were touched ineffaceably with 
good influence, — cherish a pleasant vision which 
no fate can harm, and remember with ceaseless 
gratitude the blithe days at Brook Farm." 

After Brook Farm there was an interval at home 
in New York which was crowded with work and 
pleasure. The latter came chiefly from music 
and the social circle in which the family moved. 
In November, 1843, he writes from New York to a 
very dear friend, with whom the relations formed 
at Brook Farm continued through life : "I have 
heard fine music since I have been here, — Ole 
Bull, Castillan, etc., etc." After describing some 
of his social occupations, he adds : " My days I pass 
in my room reading Goethe's ' Wilhelm Meister ' 
and Novalis. With Burrill I read ' Agricultural 
Chemistry ' and ' Practical Agriculture.' Next 
week, with mother, we shall begin the Epistles and 
Gospels. Apart from these, more strictly, studies, 
I am reading Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, 
Massinger, Ford, and smaller poets." 

Thus the winter passed in the old home. In the 
spring of 1844 the brothers, George being then 
just passed twenty, went to Concord, " for the bet- 
ter furtherance," as the elder writes, '' of our main 
and original end, — the desire to unite in our own 
persons the freedom of a country life with moderate 



30 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

outdoor manual occupation, and with intellectual 
cultivation and pursuits. 

"At Concord we first took up our residence in 
the family of an elderly farmer, recommended by 
Mr. Emerson. We gave up half the day (except 
in hay time, when we gave the whole day) to shar- 
ing the farm work indiscriminately with the farm 
laborers. The rest of the day we devoted to other 
pursuits, or to. social intercourse or correspondence ; 
and we had a flat-bottomed rowing-boat built for 
us, in which we spent very many afternoons on the 
pretty little river. For our second season we re- 
moved to another farm and farmer's house, nearer 
Mr. Emerson and Walden Pond, where we occu- 
pied only a single room, making our own beds and 
living in the very simplest and most primitive style. 
A small piece of ground, which we hired of the 
farmer, we cultivated for ourselves, raising vege- 
tables only and selling the superfluous produce, 
and distributing our time much as before." 

Here was a very different life from that of 
Brook Farm. Both had in common healthy, out- 
door occupation which built up Curtis's constitu- 
tion, and helped make possible the arduous and in- 
cessant labor of later years, and both had the charm 
and advantage of dwelling with nature in a lovely 
land. But the " picnic " and the " masquerade " 
of Brook Farm had given place to afternoons in 
the woods or on the water ; and the social inter- 
course was simpler, graver, less exciting, though 
not less stimulating, and more formative. " Have 



EMERSON AND BROOK FARM. 31 

I told you of our club," lie writes to his father, 
— "- Mr. Alcott, Mr. Emerson, Mr. Hawthorne, El- 
lery Channing, Henry Thoreau, George Bradford, 
Burrill and I, some known to you ? We meet on 
Monday eves in Mr. Emerson's library, and there 
discuss 

" * Fate, freewill, foreknowledge absolute.' " 

Some half dozen years later, in an article on 
Emerson written for the " Homes of American 
Authors," Mr. Curtis gives a reminiscence of this 
club : " I went, the first Monday evening, very 
much as Ixion may have gone to his banquet. 
The philosophers sat dignified and erect. There 
was a constrained but very amiable silence, which 
had the impertinence of a tacit inquiry, seeming to 
ask, ' Who will now proceed to say the finest thing 
that has ever been said ? ' It was quite involuntary 
and unavoidable, for the members lacked that 
fluent social genius without which a club is im- 
possible. I vaguely remember that the Orphic 
Alcott invaded the Sahara of silence with a solemn 
'saying,' to which, after due pause, the honora- 
ble member for Blackberry Pastures^ responded 
by some keen and graphic observation, — while 
the Olympian host,^ anxious that so much good 
material should be spun into something, beamed 
smiling encouragement upon all parties. But the 
conversation became more and more staccato. 
Miles Coverdale,^ a statue of night and silence, sat, 
a little removed, under a portrait of Dante, gazing 
1 Thoreau. ^ Emerson. ^ Hawthorne. 



32 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

imperturbably upon the group ; and as he sat in 
the shadow, his dark eyes and hair and suit of 
sables made him, in that society, the black thread 
of mystery which he weaved into his stories, while 
the shifting presence of the Brook Farmer ^ played 
like heat-lightning around the room." 

Mr. Curtis's writings contain many references 
to these happy, fruitful years at Concord : glimpses 
of the temper and growth of his mind at the time 
will be had from the following extracts from let- 
ters to his father in the autumn of 1844 : — 

"I have recently been reading J. Q. Adams's 
address to his constituents in 1842, and Dr. Chan- 
ning's tracts upon slavery. These and my own 
observation of the course of the South, especially 
within a year, indicate very plainly that at last the 
country will divide upon Slavery. This will not 
be the result of Northern agitation, but of the 
perpetual attempt of the South to extend its limits 
and thereby prolong the institution, and therefore 
to continue the reserved power which now always 
confirms its attitude towards the North. This at- 
tempt, which now is plainly seen, which now forms 
one of the two great topics upon which the parties 
— indeed, upon which the North and the South 
differ — will not be tolerated in its success by the 
conscience of Northern men. They must then 
take the stand that will join the issue." 

Then follows an ingenious argument as to the 
clause in the Constitution giving representation to 

1 Bradford. 



EMERSON AND BROOK FARM. 33 

the South for its slaves as " persons," though held 
hy the masters as " property," and as to the inev- 
itable revolt of the North against the unfairness 
of this agreement, and the arrogance and extrava- 
gance of the Southern claims regarding it. 

" The conduct of the South outrages the moral 
sentiments and the letter of the laws, and, to the 
remonstrance of the North, at one time challenges 
it with intent to dissolve the Union, and at an- 
other fiercely brandishes the threat against the 
North. While the wise statesman calmly illus- 
trates its treachery and actual violation of the 
compact, let him firmly say that we can submit 
no longer to be accomplices in this angel-abhorred 
guilt. We do not deny that the articles of Union 
bind that community upon us, and therefore must 
insist upon amendments. Quite willing not to in- 
terfere politically in the matter within your bor- 
ders, we cannot, we will not, aid you in so mon- 
strous a sin. 

"How nobly might Mr. Webster, a man too 
great that we should ever despair, crown his fame 
in hearts which would fain welcome him, but can- 
not yet, by assuming this position ! 

'' But if the strongest statesmen will not advance 
in this matter, there must come men from different 
pursuits than politics to press the question on. It 
is idle to think or to hope that it will not be asked. 
Mr. Choate and Mr. Bates and the courtly Mr. 
Winthrop and colleagues will be reserved at home 
for graceful times of peace and public ease, while 



34 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

men that cannot speak fluently at mass meetings 
will go and demand justice of the South. They 
will say : ' We will unite with you as citizens, not 
as robbers and unjust.' Dear father, write me 
how these things are. I trust all nobility and gen- 
erosity has not fled out of politics, and left them 
bells and baubles for foolish men to wear." 

The father seems to have pointed out in reply 
the value of the Union, and the hope that slavery 
would yet be abolished without disunion. To 
which the son responded : — 

" I read your last letter with pleasure, dear 
father, for I did not know if mine would touch 
an interest that was very prominent in your mind. 
It is most true that slavery will be abolished 
finally by the force of public opinion. But the 
North begins to groan already. - While it recog- 
nizes the comity of nations and the solemn bond, 
it begins to speak of the separation with plain 
words. It may not be expedient just now, but 
then when will it be ? The old conviction that 
no law, no arrangement, no gain, can permit such 
direct participation as is provided by the Constitu- 
tion, will at last distinctly demand some change, 
and, even if the demand be postponed an hundred 
years, the South will not be ready. What gains 
the South by separation? It will take Texas to 
its bosom and possibly conquer Mexico, but no 
State can endure the unalterable disapprobation of 
the world. It would yield to the heat of universal 
censure like wax. It becomes a very grave ques- 



EMERSON AND BROOK FARM, 35 

tion to every man. In the event of a disunion, 
the North might enjoy less commerce and a thou- 
sand decreased political advantages, but, as unto 
an individual who sacrifices to Justice, there would 
be no real loss, but an eternal gain. Nor could it 
tighten the bonds. Men complain that the anti- 
slavery movement has had that effect upon the 
slaves. But it is very transitory, if it be so. It 
is the winking of eyes upon which light suddenly 
flows, — a moment and they will be strong and 
clear in the sun. It is not credible that a stroke 
for freedom ever served to perpetuate slavery, 
because it is an indication of that spirit, alive 
and in action, to which alone slavery will yield. I 
have not now the inclination to pursue the theme 
further, though it has wide and inviting relations." 

This is not a weak statement for a young man 
of twenty. Disunion as a remedy became clearly 
enough futile and unnecessary to his riper and 
better informed judgment, but the conception of 
the evil demanding a remedy was sound and firmly 
defined, and remained through the gallant struggle 
he was afterwards to make. 

In another letter he discusses the question of 
the tariff, then a very urgent one. Kemembering 
that his father was a protectionist, and had pub- 
licly defended protection, the letter is a pleasing 
proof at once of the son's independence and of 
his confidence in the fair-mindedness of his fa- 
ther, — no slight element in the education of the 
former : — 



36 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

"Just now I am sad, as I close Webster's 
speeches (the old), which have occupied me some 
days, to reflect how narrow are our sympathies. 
Born an American, I am by that fact heir to cer- 
tain responsibilities. But also I am born an in- 
habitant of the world. I owe to my country the 
duty of a citizen, but I cannot surrender to that 
my duty as a man. My obligations are impera- 
tive towards Englishmen and Frenchmen. If I am 
bound, so far as lies in me, to see that my land is 
well governed, I must not forget that no govern- 
ment is essentially good for that land which is 
selfish and small. My country is well governed 
when the world is. All my obligations as a man 
include those of a citizen. I have no right to 
protect American labor at the expense of foreign. 
What does it matter to me or. to God whether 
Lowell or Manchester be ruined? Extend this 
into politics and it places us upon a wide, universal 
platform. It does not suffer any American feeling 
or British feeling. While I confess that the British 
laborers starve, I do not do very well to refuse to 
take what they make ; I must pull down my restric- 
tive laws. I must say to the whole world, ' He who 
makes the best cloth shall have the best pay.' 
Then come English and all manner of foreign 
goods into the market and spoil our trade. But 
there is plainly but one way of paying for all im- 
ports, and that is by exports. Sugar and rice, pota- 
toes and grain, must pay for all this, and there will 
be no more goods than I give an equivalent for. 



EMERSON AND BROOK FARM. 37 

Then if there be not enough, let our own manu- 
facturers turn to. Besides, commerce rests upon 
natural laws and not upon human will. If Amer- 
ica is not a productive garden for some other land, 
no tariff will make her so. But suppose that our 
philanthropic, not national, government, is estab- 
lished, then the world becomes the subject of a won- 
derful organized moral power. Or, again, Amer- 
ica cannot stand upon such a basis of humanity, 
and sinks, what then ? The nation who conquers 
us has pressed a sharp thorn in the side of its 
selfish ambition. Into the heart of selfish Europe 
— Russia, England, France or whatever nation — 
is transferred a body of men who are obeying eter- 
nal laws and not state laws, or state laws only 
so far as they are eternal. 

'* We ask, in our political relations. Will it ben- 
efit the state ? — very seldom. Is it right ? But 
the state is not necessarily benefited because it has 
a full treasury, and armies and navies, and com- 
merce and trade, any more than a man is benefited 
by fine houses and parks. Let us make a maxim 
in politics, that what is good for America is good 
for the other nations, — for all, because it is uni- 
versal and unselfish. I have a right to wear fine 
linen, and use Paris handkerchiefs, if I choose to 
pay for them at their prices, and you have no 
right to make me buy yours by making theirs 
dearer. I see no necessity that American manu- 
facturers should flourish if they cannot do so 
without thrusting our neighbor out of the market. 



38 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

I will have no fear that God has given us a land 
that cannot support itself against the world in the 
noblest, freest manner, or, if I see it cannot, I shall 
also see that it is no proper home. 

" ' Be not forced from your integrity ' — so says 
the wise statesman, who is then a student of the 
divine government — 'by the dishonesty of others.' 
The citizens of the republic, who are willing to be 
men of the world also, will be content to sleep on 
hard beds and forego luxuries if such means be 
necessary to preserve the law they cherish. Now 
we are arrayed against each other. The great aim 
is, which state shall be highest, strongest, wealth- 
iest, — which shall thrust down the other and rise 
beyond it, — not which shall lift the other and then 
nobly rise beyond. The laws of nature are as sim- 
ple for the mass as for the man. The life of a 
state should be as sound and unincumbered as of 
the individual. If we are not ready for such a 
state, let us at least say nothing of the older gov- 
ernments in their disparagement. We are not the 
experimenters upon the free order of society that 
the world has flattered us into the belief that we 
are." 



CHAPTER III. 

EUROPEAN TRAVEL. 

In the autumn of 1845 Mr. Curtis returned to 
Ms father's house in New York, and there passed 
the winter. His thoughts were turning toward 
Europe, though he spoke of them only as "bud- 
ding hopes." In a letter to one of his old friends 
of the Brook Farm days, he describes his time as 
given to " reading Italian three hours and German 
about two, going to my room at nine, and coming 
down to dinner at four." The evenings were 
devoted to society, and very frequently to music, 
at home and elsewhere. In the spring he returned 
for a while to Concord, — " the soft, sunny spring 
in the silent Concord meadows, where I sat in the 
great cool barn through the long, still golden after- 
noons and read the history of Rome." By sum- 
mer his plans were completed, and in a note to his 
father in June, 1846, he submitted a proposition 
that the latter should provide a letter of credit for 
ten thousand francs, " not that I shall expect to 
spend that sum in two years, but because it is well 
to have a generous background to our picture." 

He sailed from New York early in August on the 
packet-ship Nebraska for Marseilles, the " magic 



40 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

voyage over the summer sea " lasting forty-six days. 
The first winter was spent in Rome, the second 
in Berlin, the third in Paris, the fourth on the Nile 
and in Palestine. He kept a very full diary for 
the first two years, which I have been permitted to 
consult, and from which some extracts will serve to 
show the manner of the impressions made by this 
wholly new experience, w^hich was in some ways 
the richest of his life. 

During his journeying in Europe, he wrote pretty 
regularly to the ^' Courier and Enquirer," of which 
Mr. Henry J. Raymond was then the managing 
editor, and to the " Tribune." These letters were 
devoted mostly to public affairs and public men. 
They are good " newspaper work," with no rhetoric 
or nonsense about them, — clear, straightforward, 
careful reporting of the higher sort. They show 
keenness of observation, sound, shrewd judgment 
of men and things, and a breadth and penetration 
which were remarkable in so young and entirely 
inexperienced a writer. It will be recalled that 
when he reached Italy Pius IX. was the idol of the 
Liberals, and was stirring all Europe with hope or 
dismay, as the case might be, by professions and 
by proofs of confidence in the people. His sojourn 
in Germany covered the troublous times of 1847 
and 1848, and his stay in Paris some of the most 
trying experiences of the second French Republic, 
so that there was much to excite the generous sym- 
pathy of a young American, which in his case was 
certainly not lacking, and much also to test the 



EUROPEAN TRAVEL. 41 

coolness of judgment and the practical sense of a 
journalist, and these also were not wanting. Al- 
though these letters were necessarily ephemeral, I 
think the writing of them was a fortunate thing for 
Mr. Curtis. They imposed on him, with his stand- 
ard of duty, the discipline of regular and system- 
atic observation and statement, and gave him the 
opportunity of practice in writing, with just enough 
responsibility to steady his energies, and without 
the temptations which the attempt at " literature " 
presents to a youthful author. The letters, of course, 
vanished promptly; he never even kept a collec- 
tion of them, and they are not likely to be known 
even to the few survivors among his friends of that 
period. But it was with satisfaction that I hunted 
down a considerable number of them in the yellow 
files of the old journals, — so strangely meagre 
and limited as they now seem, — and found them 
distinctly better than most of the work of the same 
sort, and showing evidence of the qualities that 
were to make of the writer one of the strongest 
journalists of his time, and one whose influence was 
to be great, and in important directions decisive. 

The first distinct impression of the strange life 
about him came from the observances of the Catho- 
lic religion, so remote from anything with which he 
had been familiar at home. 

" Late in the evening," he wrote at Genoa, " a 
funeral procession of priests glided swiftly, silently 
by us, bearing flashing torches, but themselves 
shrouded in their long, straight black robes, and a 



42 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

pointed black veil or bag hanging from their broad 
sable hats to the breast, so that they seemed shapes 
moulded of the darkness. It was dreary and 
mournful, their rapid motion and entire black- 
ness. How is the sweeping black of the Christian 
a more hopeful emblem than the inverted torch of 
the splendid old Grecian Pagans ? The faint echo 
of their tread had scarcely died before a loud sing- 
ing arrested us in one of the narrow by-streets, and, 
turning up, we found a group of people of every 
age kneeling and standing and singing before a 
shrine of the Virgin at the street corner, dimly 
lighted by a lantern, and a few withered flowers 
lying before it. The vesper song was of a few 
long-drawling notes sung in unison, and sounded so 
forlorn and heartless and hopeless in the desolate 
streets, which looked like caverns fit for midnight 
assassinations, that it made my heart ache. It 
seemed as if all elasticity must be gone from lives 
which could be fed by such means and men as this 
evening has shown us, and yet the people seem less 
serious and more contented than similar classes in 
America. As we returned to our hotel, the echo of 
the vesper hymns came floating out of the desolate, 
narrow streets on every side, — wild and wailing 
and foreign. To-night, more than ever, I felt how 
far away I was from home." 

In Florence, where he spent a month, the notes 
in his diary disclose a similar vein of reflection. 
" The old buildings, and the sense of pictures all 
around, and the fine statues which meet your eye 



EUROPEAN TRAVEL. 43 

as you walk in any quarter, make this southern 
city and its inhabitants superficial motes upon the 
antique grandeur. I have not met a man in the 
street who did not look sharp and mean and stupido 
There is no fine air about them which could possi- 
bly suggest that their ancestry were once the kings 
of the world ; the women have nothing romantic or 
interesting in their faces or mien ; and one feels 
very soon that these are the purveyors, and persons 
of convenience, in places to which all that is best 
and noblest must be sympathetically drawn. In 
America there is the charm of universal harmony : 
the people, in character and form and feature, cor-^ 
respond with the state of every art ; the congre- 
gation and the worship are as impressive as the 
temple ; the wise shrewdness of the merchants and 
the general aspect of action harmonize with the 
universal absence and postponement of art. Here 
the churches seem withdrawn farther away into 
the cold depths of antiquity, because the worship is 
so tawdry and trivial, not in itself, but because the 
men who lead it appear to feel it no more than 
their gorgeous robes. One can imagine sometimes 
a yearning in the broad, lofty spaces of these build- 
ings, which are themselves the stately children of 
genius and religion, to feel their heights and depths 
once thrill with the shock of an equal worship. 
And yet, if one would be harmoniously satisfied, he 
may well be so in one of them, where, with music and 
incense and the dazzling splendor of robes of flow- 
ered gold, the Catholic service is performed. And 



44 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

that is the way it should be contemplated. The 
forms which are used are of a birth as religious and 
sincere as the temples themselves, and there is no 
need of regarding the priests as men at all." 

As he journeyed towards Rome, the charms of 
Italy took closer possession of him. '' Italy," he 
writes after a week in that city, " is no fable, and 
the wonderful depth of purity in the air and blue 
in the sky has hung upon my eyes all this glorious 
day. Sometimes the sky is an intensely blue and 
distant arch, and sometimes it melts in the sunlight, 
and lies pale and rare and delicate upon the eye, 
so that one feels that he is breathing the sky and 
moving through it. I looked from a lofty balcony 
at the Vatican upon broad gardens, intensely green 
with evergreen palms and orange-trees, in which 
gleamed the golden fruit and the rich, rounding 
tufts of Italian pines ; and the solemn shaft of cy- 
press stood over fountains which sported rainbows 
into the air, which was silver-clear, transparent, and 
on which the outline of the hills and foliage was 
drawn like a flame against the sky at night. Into 
the air rose floating the dome of St. Peter's, which 
is not a nucleus of the city, like the Duomo at 
Florence, but a crown more imposing as one is far- 
ther removed." 

In Rome again, it was the church that first im- 
pressed him strongly. Of the music at St. Peter's, 
he writes : — 

" Then from the high choir at the opposite side 
of the church and far over our heads came swim- 



EUROPEAN TRAVEL. 45 

ming down the tremulous delicacy of the 'nuns' 
chant,' like voices from heaven. The sound per- 
vaded the dim air of the church like a radiance 
too subtle to be seen, but warming and ennobling 
the soul with a sense of celestial splendor. It was 
also of the extremest melancholy — a hymn so sad 
that all the bright days and hopes of life seemed 
then no more than the few keen stars at night and 
as powerless as they upon the darkness. It was a 
service all incense and music, upon which daylight 
seemed not bold enough to obtrude, and exhaling 
a worship like the delicatest fragrance of flowers." 

He mentions the Pope, whom he saw quite fre- 
quently, always with sympathy, as in the follow- 
ing description of the festival of the Eve of St. 
John's : — 

" Last night at the Pope's Palace upon the Pi- 
azza Cavallo upon the Quirinal Hill, we saw a rare 
and beautiful spectacle. It was the Eve of St. 
John's festival, whose name the Pope bears. There- 
fore at dusk crowds began to assemble upon the 
hill, which in front of the palace is very spacious, 
looking toward the west over the city and its crown 
of St. Peter's dome, and surrounded only with 
stately palaces. In the centre of the hill is a sim- 
ple, ample fountain whose water rises from a broad 
vase into which it falls again, dripping enough over 
the edge to girt the urn with a shining silver fringe. 
Over this fountain an Egyptian obelisk points 
steadily upward in the blue air, at whose base two 
noble figures of Grecian youths restrain two rear- 



46 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

ing horses, the work, it is said, of Phidias and Prax- 
iteles. The spire, its centre, its sides and its pros- 
pect are all worthy, and here in the early evening 
after the Ave Maria the people assembled. Col- 
ored fires flashed upon the palaces from an altar of 
Liberty, emblematic of the spirit which rules the 
country and which the people hail and celebrate on 
every occasion. The clouds were heavy and a flash 
of lightning swept at intervals a broad light over 
all ; a slight shower passed, at which thousands of 
umbrellas made a smooth billowy surface for the 
human sea. But when the procession approached 
with torches and music, the rain ceased, the um- 
brellas fell, the torches crowded into the crowd ; 
from the people rang a long, heaven-piercing shout, 
from the balconies and palaces streamed fires of 
various splendor until a new day shone steadily 
over the multitude, touching the statues into life, 
and in the midst of it, the doors of an upper bal- 
cony were thrown open and, preceded by the cross, 
which always precedes him on public occasions, 
and by four huge wax torches, the Pope came for- 
ward above the ringing shouts and in the steady 
splendor and bowed his head to the railing of the 
balcony. Then came a moment of stillness ; the 
crowd was hushed as a sleeping child, and the Pope 
raised his hands, breathed a short prayer, and 
turning to the crowd gave his blessing and retired. 
Then came the shouts again and the music and 
new rockets and candles — until in a few moments 
all was still again, but it was a sight rare and im- 



EUROPEAN TRAVEL. 47 

pressive. The vast crowd drawn alone by rever- 
ence and respect to their chief — and he responding 
to their call with no appeal to passion or pride, but 
with a prayer and his blessing. In no other country 
could that be seen. In no other country could the 
vast sentiment inspired by a mass of people obey- 
ing a noble instinct be so sublimely crowned. It 
was perfect. It was a scene for the Arcadia of a 
poet — or the paradise of a wise Christian." 
Here is a trace of a different sentiment : — 
"Saturday, October 31, 1846. To-day I went 
to the graves of Shelley and Keats, who lie in a 
green, sequestered spot under the walls of old 
Home, where the sunlight lingers long and where 
in the sweet society of roses whose bloom does not 
wither, they sleep always a summer sleep. Shake- 
speare sang long ago Shelley's epitaph : — 

* Nothing" of him that doth fade, 
But doth suffer a sea change 
Into something rich and strange.' 

And Keats sighed his upon his death bed : — 

'Here lies one whose name was writ in water/ 

Fate is no less delicate than stern, which brought 
Keats from his cold north to lie in an Italian grave, 
and which, sucking the sweet breath of Shelley in 
a stormy night at sea, laid his ashes and unburned 
heart in the spot whose beauty, he said, might 
make one in love with death. Yet, by these graves 
too, one feels the grimness of fate which strikes so 
suddenly into silence the lips which heaven seems 



48 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

to yearn to pass in music. The sun was setting 
as we came away, after one of the aerially soft days 
with which our imaginations endow Italy. The 
rich golden flood streamed through the arches of 
the Coliseum, but could not unbend the stern grav- 
ity of its decay. It looked cold and still, the image 
of the destiny which consumes it." 

And here is a note made on the eve of his de- 
parture from Rome. 

" Thus far I find that my European life has 
taught me a cosmopolitanism which I could never 
have learned at home. I have read very few books 
this winter and have been very little at home, but 
I have been unsphered in the society of so many 
persons and I have begun to realize how good 
every sphere is, although so different from my own. 
When we are children we fancy the horizon is the 
end of the world, but the man who lives just beyond 
the edge sees grand mountains and seas of which 
we do not dream, and if we are wedded to our 
quiet groves and streams by long years of intimacy 
and habit, when by chance we pass the boundary, 
we shall not enjoy the magnificence, and so lose the 
various splendor of the world." 

Leaving Rome in mid-April, Curtis passed a 
month or more in Naples and its neighborhood, an- 
other in Florence, a third in Venice, a few weeks' 
leisurely wandering in northern Italy, and crossing 
the Alps from Como, settled in Berlin for the win- 
ter. The next spring opened at the close of April 
with a week in " Saxon Switzerland " on foot, and 



EUROPEAN TRAVEL. 49 

the summer was given to journeyings through 
Austria and Hungary, back to the Rhine, again 
crossing the Alps and recrossing to the Geneva 
country ; then by a wide detour into Germany, Paris 
was reached, where the winter of 1848-49 was 
passed. I have, perhaps, given enough from the 
diary to show the spirit of this experience. It was 
a varied one, with much intense enjoyment, numer- 
ous interesting acquaintances, some valuable friends 
won and to be kept, and a steady mental develop- 
ment of which the diary shows mostly the soberer 
side. The record he made, and which, I think, he 
had some intention of publishing, is singularly void 
of personal allusions either to himself or to his 
companions. It gives nothing as to the comfort or 
discomfort of the inns, and little as to the convey- 
ances. A larger part is given to the scenery than 
to any other one thing, and it is plain how much he 
was gaining in that deep and rich knowledge of 
nature that counted so greatly in his subsequent 
work. He saw many pictures, knew many artists 
of various races, and had obviously a keen enjoy- 
ment of their works. But though, in a very im- 
portant sense, he was by mental gift a true artist, 
I do not think he ever got far, or ever cared to get 
very far, into the mysteries of the craft. The sub- 
ject, the sentiment and the general impression of 
the color and form remained with him, but of the 
processes and their details, of the elements of the 
war that was then raging still between the Roman- 
ticists and the Classicists, or the one on which the 



50 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

pre-Raphaelites were entering, I find no hint. He 
must have encountered these things in the society 
with which he was intimate, but I imagine that 
they left him indifferent. Nor is there much sign 
of the studies in which he really engaged with en- 
ergy and must have pursued with some system. He 
seems to have been at this time, as he was in later 
life, the very reverse of what we usually understand 
by a man of books, still more of a bookish man. 
In his diary he very rarely quotes poetry, and in 
the homes of Dante and Petrarch, of Goethe, of 
Voltaire, their names come only incidentally to his 
pen. The places as they were, the landscape in 
which they were set, the life he found in them are 
what he describes. The people did interest him 
greatly as persons, as races, as political communi- 
ties. He was in Italy, in Germany, and in Austria 
at the time when the ferments which reached their 
height in 1848 were general. He saw the Milanese 
" rise " and saw them again when their hopes were 
crushed. He was in Hungary on the eve of the 
outbreak that brought Kossuth, later, to the United 
States. All these events awakened interest of the 
keenest, and sympathy, but it was a very calm 
judgment that he passed upon them. He was al- 
ways struck by the contrast between the moods and 
manners he saw and those to which he was used at 
home. The theatrical element, and the rhetorical, 
while they amused him, made him distrustful. In 
Europe, as at Brook Farm, he never lacked the sav- 
ing sense of humor, and the sobriety, the saneness 



EUROPEAN TRAVEL, 61 

of his general view were remarkable. There was 
no cynical affectation in it, not a trace of indiffer- 
ence, nor any pride, personal or national, but al- 
ways the quiet appreciation of the extent and com- 
plexity of anything like a national movement, and 
of the need of breadth and steadiness and common 
sense. 



CHAPTEK IV. 

THE LITERAKY FIELD. 

Mr. Curtis's literary career began in 1851, on 
his return from Europe and the East, with the 
publication of the Howadji books. It was a period 
of marked mental activity in the United States, 
when reputations that were to become world-wide 
were still making, and when only two or three 
of the now widely famed writers had yet achieved 
an established name at home, and only one, the 
veteran Washington Irving, could be said to be 
much known abroad. The habitat of what there 
was of American literature was geographically 
very limited. Nearly all the writers of the day 
were New Englanders by residence, or, as was Mr. 
Curtis, by descent. A smaller group of very 
active minds centred in New York, and there 
were scattered workers here and there along the 
Atlantic Coast. But the intellectual life of the 
country, so far as it was expressed in books, or 
even in newspapers, was still east of the Allegha- 
nies and on the eastern edge of the slope. The 
magazine as we know it, the roomy and hospitable, 
stimulating and nourishing home of writing of 
every sort, inviting the writer who has anything 



THE LITERARY FIELD. 53 

worth saying to address all the readers of the 
land — and of other lands — worth having, did not 
exist, though the " North American Review " in 
Boston and the " Knickerbocker " and " Harper's " 
in New York had made notable and valuable begin- 
nings. Within what now seems the restricted soci- 
ety of the opening of the second half of the century 
there was, as I have said, marked mental activity 
in a considerable variety of directions, much of it 
wayward, eager, curious, some of it grotesque, 
much of it shallow, affected, and of no importance, 
but much of it also serious, pure, lofty, and, as 
the event has proved, of lasting influence. Curi- 
ously enough in this confused and unformed so- 
ciety of writers the most conspicuous and eminent, 
though certainly not the most representative, was 
Washington Irving, as completely a man of letters, 
and yet distinctly of his own time, as Addison. 
He was the Dean of the American literary body, 
being, in 1851, sixty-eight, with the ''Knicker- 
bocker's History of New York," one of the most 
characteristic of his works, more than forty years 
in the past and the "• Sketch Book " and '' Brace- 
bridge Hall " but ten years nearer. Substantially 
all his work was done, and the '' Life of Wash- 
ington " and " Wolfert's Roost " alone awaited 
publication. It is a pleasant thing to note that 
nearly forty years later Mr. Curtis's Monograph on 
Irving became one of the most valued publications 
of the Grolier Club of New York, and remains 
a graceful and affectionate tribute to qualities ol 



64 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

mind and character, some of which the writer richly 
shared with the beloved subject of the Essay. It 
may be added that Mr. Curtis's correspondence 
discloses a personal intercourse with Irving of a 
sympathetic if not intimate nature which must 
have had its influence. 

At this time, Hawthorne was in the prime of 
manhood, forty-seven years of age, but was known 
chiefly as a writer of sketches of singular and 
subtle charm. The two volumes of " Twice-told 
Tales " had been published in 1837 and 1845, and 
the " Mosses from an Old Manse " in 1846. " The 
Scarlet Letter " had appeared the year before, 
but the author was still a self-distrustful, almost 
gloomy half-recluse, hardly comprehending the po- 
sition which that most original of American books 
has assured to him. With Hawthorne, Mr. Curtis 
had had a certain degree of friendly relation at 
Brook Farm and at Concord, and I like to think 
that his remote and slightly cynical attitude of 
mind was felt as a counterpoise to the "trans- 
cendental " tendencies of the other companions 
of that period, and may have counted in main- 
taining the sanity of spirit with which the youth 
came from those stimulating but not entirely whole- 
some associations. The purely literary influence 
of Hawthorne it is not easy to trace, especially in 
Mr. Curtis's earlier work. But I cannot doubt 
that the sobriety, lucidity and restraint of expres- 
sion in a writer of such powerful and penetrating 
imagination, united with the early personal inter- 



THE LITERARY FIELD, 65 

course, aided in the development of that later 
style which in the " Easy Chair " and in portions 
of " Prue and I " was to become not less delight- 
ful than that of the tenant of the " Old Manse." 
Of other novelists and essayists Fenimore Cooper, 
the most prolific and widely known, was just pass- 
ing away ; Miss Sedgwick and Mrs. Sigourney, 
greatly read, though not destined to a lasting fame, 
had closed their literary labors ; Herman Melville, 
E. H. Dana, Jr., Donald G. Mitchell, Bayard 
Taylor, were of Mr. Curtis's own age, or nearly so, 
and some of them of his own circle. Nathaniel P. 
Willis, in literature, as in life, claiming the func- 
tion of arbiter elegantiarum^ and so far recognized 
as such that I find a correspondent naively flatter- 
ing Curtis with the opinion that he may attain to 
Willis's level, was then at the height of his vogue. 
More brilliant, and with a larger number whose 
fame was to be permanent among the writers of 
that day, were the poets. Bryant at the age of 
fifty-seven was the oldest, and had already achieved 
the hold on the future which was sustained if not 
strengthened by his later work. In 1851, he was 
most prominent as a journalist of deep conviction 
and of rare vigor and purity of style. Emerson's 
poetry was accepted, with his prose, as an expres- 
sion of lofty and often mystical thought, and was 
as yet more the object of a limited cult than the 
general delight that it has since become. Whit- 
tler's reputation also was high with a somewhat 
limited class, but had not gained general recogni- 



56 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

tion. Longfellow was already the most read and 
most widely loved of American poets. Lowell, but 
five years tlie senior of Curtis, was at the height 
of the peculiar popularity won by the " Fable for 
Critics" and, in a different vein, "The Biglow 
Papers." He had fairly thrown down the gauntlet 
in the long fight with slavery, and, incredible as it 
now seems, had perceptibly clouded his prospects 
of advancement with those who were supposed to 
distribute the prizes of literary effort. Curtis, 
who was to become one of his closest friends, and 
who was later to join him in the memorable con- 
test with slavery, was as yet but an admirer of his 
varied but irregularly developed genius. Holmes, 
who at twenty-two, had given the country one of 
the most spirited of patriotic poems, " Old Iron- 
sides," was known chiefly as- a Harvard profes- 
sor, with a rare gift for " occasional" verse. The 
sisters, Alice and Phoebe Cary, published their 
first volume of poems in the same year with the 
" Nile Notes." Buchanan Read and Stoddard 
had each one volume of poems to his credit. John 
G. Saxe's little volume, revealing one of the bright- 
est and lightest of American humorists in verse, 
was published in 1850. 

It remains to mention that in history, Prescott 
was the only writer who had achieved very much. 
His "Ferdinand and Isabella," "Conquest of Mex- 
ico," and " Conquest of Peru," were, at that time, 
the chief American histories. Bancroft had issued 
but three volumes of his great work. Hildreth's 



THE LITERARY FIELD. 67 

was in course of publication. Motley was hardly 
decided as to his own course and was known only 
as the author of "Morton's Hope," and "Merry 
Mount," which one hardly thinks of now in connec- 
tion with his name. 

It is not easy in these closing days of the cen- 
tury, when Mr. Curtis's name is more or less 
closely associated with the group of New England 
writers whose names are so generally honored and 
whose work has become an integral part and a 
large part of the intellectual inheritance of edu- 
cated Americans, clearly to imagine how different 
from that which we now recognize was the influ- 
ence they were able to exert upon him at the open- 
ing of his career. It is worth while to dwell with 
some emphasis upon the fact that he was himself 
one of the builders of American literature, and that 
when he began to write, the conditions by which he 
was surrounded were such as necessarily to throw 
him upon his own resources. What he brought to 
the structure was his own material, fashioned by 
himself. It was not and could not be borrowed 
from those who had gone before him, and if it was 
a worthy and a substantial contribution, as, with- 
out exaggerating its importance, I believe that it 
was, it must be remembered that what there was of 
it was original. I think that it was so in style as 
well as in matter, and it is in the hope of bringing 
that fact more definitely to the minds of my readers 
that I have given this brief, but I hope fairly accu- 
rate, review of the literary field in 1851. 



68 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS 

On the other hand, given a mind of native vigor 
and of genuine sensitiveness, given healthy aspira- 
tions toward mental achievement, given a point of 
view of rational independence and a character of 
sound substance and of firm as well as fine texture, 
and it was a good thing to begin near the begin- 
ning, to be of the pioneers, to share in youth the 
common and powerful impulse of a young literary 
society, to be more conscious of the immensity of 
the future than of that of the past, and to feel that 
what one shall succeed in accomplishing may have 
a steadily widening influence upon the maturing 
national mind. These were the advantages of one 
whose work was begun in the middle of the nine- 
teenth century in our country. Mr. Curtis felt 
them, and I think he made the most of them. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE HOWADJI BOOKS. 

Mr. Curtis returned from Europe in 1850 with 
a definite resolve to undertake the career of an 
author. His first work, " Nile Notes of a How- 
adji," was published the following spring, when he 
had just entered his twenty-seventh year. "• To- 
day," he wrote from Providence to a friend in 
Cambridge, " will bring me the Nile Notes as a 
book, I suppose, — but I cannot have the proper 
emotions. It seems all very natural, very much as 
it seems to a young papa, who beholds a redness 
in a white blanket, and is told that it is his heir ; 
or perhaps even more as a sensible tree feels when 
it sees one of its fruits fallen separate upon the 
ground — My hand trembles (as I speak of no 
emotion) for this moment my book is placed in my 
hand — even as I wrote ' ground ' it arrived. You 
will surely have received it before you read this. 
Ah ! speak it fair ! my first born, my only child ! " 

The book was very kindly received by the news- 
papers, though the notices of it which I have come 
upon do not make that fact very conclusive as to 
its merit, for most of them are curiously flat and 
perfunctory. More significant was the sale of an 



60 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

edition of twenty-five hundred copies within the 
first half year. The author himseK said, in April, 
in his straightforward way : " The Nile Notes I 
cannot hesitate to call successful, but not a great 
hit." John Dwight, in the "Commonwealth" of 
Boston, spoke in a tone at once flattering and dis- 
criminating. E. P. Whipple, one of the oracles 
of the day, declares of it that he had " never be- 
fore felt the East." In referring to some pleasant 
opinions he had heard, Mr. Curtis wrote : " In his 
letter Mons. Aubepine (Hawthorne) tells another 
twice-told tale. But how sweeter so ! How like 
Fame, when a famous man applauds and says, ' I 
see now that you are forever an author ! ' " Bent- 
ley of London published the book under the title 
of "Nile Notes of a Traveler," apparently afraid 
to trust the English reader with the Arabic equi- 
valent, Howadji. For this edition the publisher 
paid the sum of five guineas, — a curiously early 
example of the necessity for international copy- 
right. It was explained that if the book " took " 
it would immediately be printed for a shilling for 
all the railway stations, while Bentley printed it 
for ten shillings and sixpence. The English press 
was extremely cordial. The London " Daily News," 
the " Weekly News " (a wholly different paper) 
the "Athenaeum," the " Literary Gazette " and the 
" Spectator " all noticed the book, and nearly all 
with praise. " Leigh Hunt," wrote Curtis, " speaks 
of it in his 22d March number. He likes it and 
praises it, but in an amusing way. He says some- 



THE HO WAD J I BOOKS. * 61 

thing about the Author's meaning to outdo Long- 
fellow's Hyperion ! ! and of traces of D'Israeli, Em- 
erson, Eothen, and I know not how many more. 
But he so evidently likes it that the most morbidly 
vain author would be more amused than annoyed 
at his notice." 

The book did not escape censure. "May an 
immoral Howadji," wrote the author to a friend, 
"dine with you on Wednesday?" This was the 
smile that would hide pain. Mr. Curtis was deeply 
wounded by some of the comments on his work. 
His letters of this date, though full of expressions 
of grateful surprise at the praise bestowed upon 
him, and of simple-hearted, modest joy at his suc- 
cess, contain other expressions of hot and passion- 
ate indignation for those who had impugned the 
purity of his purpose. The anger was natural; 
with regard to some, it was just ; but on the whole, 
it was undue. That Mr. Curtis's mind in youth as 
in his riper age was pure, no one who knew him 
could doubt. It did not necessarily follow that 
those who did not and could not see as he saw, 
were not pure. It was the forever-recurring dis- 
pute that art provokes from generation to genera- 
tion. Mr. Curtis was, in a great part of his na- 
ture, in some of the most attractive and engaging 
manifestations of his nature, an artist. With- 
out offense and with immaculate devotion, he made 
some of his studies from life. When his pictures 
came from his easel, he did not find it requisite to 
drape completely the beauty he had recognized and 



62 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

rejoiced in. One of his best loved artists in tlie 
long, happy days in the Venetian galleries, before 
he crossed the Mediterranean to Cairo, was Cor- 
reggio. It never occurred to him, the boy fresh- 
hearted from the cool walks of the Concord Aca- 
deme, that the women of Correggio were shocking 
to look upon. If one cares to re-read, forty years 
after, the chapters through which dance Kusheek 
Arnem and the dove Xenobi, and remember that 
they flowed from the pen, almost untried, of a youth 
of twenty-six, he will find readily what lay open to 
criticism on the score of taste and might honestly 
be disapproved as the too vivid presentation of a 
sensuous scene. But if he do not also find a grave 
and noble feeling under the rich play of color, a 
sense of the pathos and the tragedy that make 
the sombre background of a scene at once so allur- 
ing and so disquieting, if there shall not remain 
with him the impression of singular elevation and 
breadth of view in this young writer, then, while 
we may not dismiss him with the contempt the 
young writer showed for some of his critics, we 
may be permitted at least to differ from him. 

On this particular point, I shall let Mr. Curtis 
speak for himself, in the following manly letter to 
his father written a few days after the publication 
of the book : — 

pROYiDEisrcE, March 15, '51. 

My dear Father, — When I received 's 

first letter I was amused but not surprised. But 



THE HOWADJI BOOKS. 63 

when he wrote that you were so shocked with my 
book, I was extremely grieved, and so must always 
be — yet always with a conscience void of offense. 
My aim in the book was such that I was unwilling 
you should see the manuscript because I knew that 
we should differ so essentially that your displeas- 
ure might only be prolonged. But when I saw that 
Mr. Raymond, whom you regard so highly and who 
has no personal feeling for me, had selected the 
exceptional chapter for the Magazine, I supposed 
that I had overrated the nervousness of the gen- 
eral mind, and that the edict which cannot but 
seem to me contemptible — of immorality, or what- 
ever it is — would not be passed. 

I am sorry that I was not at home for two rea- 
sons, and glad for a good many that I was away 
— I was sorry that I had not ordered a copy sent 
to you immediately, which, however, I had not done 
for any one — having only made a list of sundry 
persons connected with journals and one or two 
friends in distant parts of the country. Then I 
was sorry that my absence seemed to indicate that 
I had run away from a bad impression. However, 
that is nothing, — I want to say precisely how the 

thing is — and am very sorry that should talk 

about obfuscated moral sense. 

When I w^as in Egypt I felt that the picture 
of impressions there had never been painted. 
Travelers have been either theorists and philoso- 
phers or young men with more money than brains, 
or professional travelers. In no book of any of 



64 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

them was the essentially sensuous^ luxurious, lan- 
guid and sense-satisfied spirit of Eastern life as 
it appears to the traveller represented. I aimed 
to do that. Here and in every newspaper notice 
(some dozen) that I have seen I find that I have 
achieved that success, and I find the same thing 
in all this outcry of immorality or indecency, or 
whatever it is, and which comes from New York 
alone. Now, the moral condemnation of ladies 
and gentlemen who would sell any daughter to any 
man, for a sufficient fortune, I do not very highly 
esteem — and that is the character of some, who, 
I hear, are most eloquent against my book. The 
moral sense of New York in general is so vitiated 
that I care for it in general no more than for such 
particular condemnations. My only sorrow is that 
you should necessarily condemn the book, and I 
am sorry, because it ought not to be condemned ! 
The dancing girls occupy no more space in the 
book than they occupied in the voyage, and they 
must always occupy a large space because they are 
the life and the most characteristically Eastern 
life of the river. You of course will feel that the 
whole thing might be omitted, but it would not be 
the same book, it would not be my book, and it 
would not in that case give the true picture of 
the Egyptian life. 

It is only the affected and self-conscious exagger- 
ation of the moral sense that could be so alarmed — 
I am angrier than I am vexed. The very brilliance 
of the coloring shows that it is not prurient, but 
poetic. 



THE HO WAD J I BOOKS. 65 

However, there is no end of such talk. I have 
written, dear father, that you may know that I de- 
plore your disappointment, w^hile I feel that it was 
unavoidable. Had I written a book to please you, 
I would not have published it because it would not 
have pleased myself; and while I confess certain 
expressions are too broad and might well be al- 
tered, the essential spirit of the book is precisely 
what I wish it. I would not have it toned down, 
for I toned it up intentionally. My objections are 
not moral but literary. 

The feeling that you have is, I am sure, more 
personal to me than real to yourself. If the book 
had been anybody's else, I doubt if you could 
have been shocked. But with your natural inter- 
est in me and equally natural desire that I should 
favorably impress every one, you were necessarily 
grieved by what was suspicious to them, not re- 
garding if it ought to be, but simply if it was so 
to them. 

I never could regret having written the book. 
If I should differ in my nature and character a 
score of years hence, I shall be no more sorry than 
I am that I once wore frocks, — and I can say so ab- 
solutely because, as I began, my conscience is void 
of offense. This outcry seems simply ludicrous. 
Your affectionate son, 

George William Curtis. 

The "Nile Notes " and the " Howadji in Syria " 
which followed in the next year, were the first 



66 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

product of a mind of extraordinary sensitiveness, 
of much strength, released rather suddenly from 
associations and habits of thought which, sustained 
with entire sincerity, had exercised a restraint of 
which the writer may have become aware only 
when freed from it. There may be detected a 
touch of half -humorous, half-deliberate defiance of 
the men and the manners Mr. Curtis had left in 
the little circle of New England transcendentalists. 
" When the Persian Poet Hafiz," says the Preface 
to the " Nile Notes," '' was asked by the Philoso- 
pher Zenda what he was good for, he replied ; ' Of 
what use is a flower ? ' 'A flower is good to smell,' 
said the Philosopher. ' And I am good to smell 
it,' said the poet." The function of a poet, prom- 
enading a sensitive and irresponsible soul through 
the lotus-fields of Egyptian experience and obser- 
vation, finding in the enjoyment of languorous 
odors not merely the excuse but the justification 
of his occupation, was certainly as far removed as 
well could be from the lofty and severe ideals of 
life in which Mr. Curtis had been nurtured. It is 
not difficult to imagine the dismay it must have 
caused some of his older companions to be asked 
to take him at his word, and it is not surprising 
that in the pages of the Howadji books they found 
only too much evidence that his word was at once 
sincere, and accurate, and that he had really de- 
scended from their cold heights to wander as long 
as he could with Hafiz in the flower-carpeted vales. 
As the role he had announced was novel, the 



THE HOWADJI BOOKS. 67 

style he assumed in it was novel also. It was 
essentially artificial, the style of the stage he had 
constructed for himself and had boldly furnished 
with an elaborate set of conventions, which he sum- 
moned his readers to accept, if they cared to un- 
derstand the piece. The offer, indeed, was, with 
gay haughtiness, a laisser ou a prendre. The 
writer would abate no jot of his terms. From the 
moment that "in a gold and purple December 
sunset " he walked down to the boat bound for the 
Nile to the moment when he reached Cairo again 
"while the sun was wreaking all his glory upon 
the West," the demand upon our imagination is 
constant. We must read as we would watch and 
listen to an opera, granting completely the as- 
sumptions of the composer. This done, there are 
melody and harmony, passion and sensuous delight, 
and — to him who will take it — aspiration toward 
beauty and deep and varied beauty. But the con- 
ditions must be observed. 

The note of invitation and of warning is sounded 
on the first page. 

" To our new eyes everything was picture. 
Vainly the broad road was crowded with Muslim 
artisans, home returning from their work. To the 
mere Muslim observer they were carpenters, ma- 
sons, laborers and tradesmen of all kinds. We 
passed many a meditating Cairene, to whom there 
was nothing but the monotony of an old story in 
that evening and on that road. But we saw all 
the pageantry of oriental romance quietly donkey- 



68 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

ing into Cairo. Camels too, swaying and waving 
like huge phantoms of the twilight, horses with 
strange gay trappings, curbed by tawny, turbaned 
equestrians, the peaked toe of the red slipper rest- 
ing in the shovel stirrup. It was a fair festal even- 
ing. The whole world was masquerading, and so 
well that it seemed reality. 

" I saw Fadladeen with a gorgeous turban and 
a gay sash. His chibouque, wound with colored 
silk and gold threads, was borne behind him by a 
black slave. Fat and funny was Fadladeen as of 
old, and though Fermorz was not by, it was clear 
to see in the languid droop of his eye, that choice 
Arabian verses were sung in the twilight of his 
mind. 

" Yet was Venus still the evening star ; for be- 
hind him, closely veiled, came .Lalla Rookh. She 
was wrapped in a vast black silken bag, that 
bulged like a balloon over her donkey. But a star- 
suffused evening cloud was that bulky blackness, 
as her twin eyes shone forth liquid ly lustrous." 

No one, of course, will pretend that this is a 
natural tone in which to write or talk, and the 
young writer himself must have been free from 
any such pretension, but if it was an artificial 
style, it was not an empty one. The scenes he 
had witnessed, the associations by which they were 
surrounded, the thought they had aroused, were 
intensely interesting, animating, absorbing. The 
style was a sincere and faithful attempt to clothe 
fitly what he had to say, to adapt the costumes and 



TEE HOWADJI BOOKS. 69 

the stage setting to the curious subject matter of 
the piece. If what was to be said was of sufficient 
substance, the plan of presentation was logical and 
should justify itself, as in fact it does. One who 
would seek a suggestive picture of travel on the 
Nile and in Syria a half century since, before the 
comforts of modern travel had opened the river 
and the desert to those beneficiaries and victims 
of Cook whose purpose is not strong enough to dis- 
pense with such comforts, can find none more truly 
informing than in Curtis' s books, delightfully free 
as, for the most part, they are, of information. 
The plan, it will be noted, was peculiarly elastic. 
The writer sets out to tell you that which he saw 
or experienced, and his thoughts, in the way that 
seemed to him most suitable. He reserves to him- 
self the guidance of the way. He gives you no 
clue. He promises no definite destination. He 
lays out no task of which you shall have a right to 
exact the completion ; you shall have what history 
he may choose to give you, and in such remote and 
fanciful relations as may occur to him ; you may 
see the people as he saw them, with the eye of the 
poet and the artist, with flashes of philosophic in- 
sight and merry glances of humor, but you shall 
not complain of the picture as lacking in detail or 
in breadth, as too sober or too light. It is the pic- 
ture as it lies in his memory, as his imagination 
and sympathy have developed and colored it. It 
does not satisfy the reader? Allans 1 " Of what 
use is a flower? " 



70 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

The result naturally is that while you get from 
these books much, very much of Egypt and Syria, of 
the Nile and the desert, of Damascus and Jerusalem 
and Esne, of the land of the mighty past and of 
the squalid and tragic present, of Cleopatra and of 
Khadra and of the Ghazeeyah, you get still more 
and constantly of the writer, and therein lies the 
charm which still holds many readers. For now, 
after the face of the land he visited is greatly 
changed, and no one may again see, traversing his 
itinerary, what was then to be seen ; though the 
questions of that time, with which he occasionally 
deals vigorously and acutely, are not the questions 
of our day and will henceforth engage only the 
historians, there remains, in the soft rich light of 
these old volumes, a portrait of the young Curtis. 
Those of us who knew him, if only by his work, in 
his ripe and beautiful maturity, in that splendid 
afternoon of his life when the sun so near its sud- 
den setting seemed still the sun of midday, will 
always find in this portrait a mournful but deep 
enjoyment. It is that of a noble youth, delighting 
in life, in its novelty, its richness, and its oppor- 
tunities, not unmindful of its duties or of its trag- 
edy, of its infinite incitements and its relentless 
limitations, but keenly sensitive to its beauty, and 
mingling a genuinely earnest sense of its graver 
side with the ready enjoyment of its lighter aspects 
natural to the buoyancy of healthy spirits. 

It is interesting also to trace in these volumes, 
unique among Mr. Curtis's writings, as they are 



THE HOWADJI BOOKS, 71 

in their subject matter, and written in a style that 
was never afterward, — save in brief portions of 
" Prue and I " — in any great degree maintained, 
the qualities that proved lasting in his work. The 
two that impress me most strongly were those that 
contributed most to his extreme charm as an ora- 
tor, the picturesqueness of his impressions and the 
rhythm of his expression. These are the more 
noticeable because they had not yet been subdued 
by study and reflection and labor. By picturesque- 
ness of impression I would not suggest a view sen- 
sitive to " bits " and readily catching the subject 
of a sketch, but rather the sensitiveness to effects, 
a breadth of vision which took in what lay be- 
fore it, not in detail or by a continuous analytic 
effort, but as a whole. Curtis was an ardent 
lover of nature ; none of all our writers with whom 
the love of nature is a characteristic trait was 
more devoted or happier. His delight in it, from 
his earliest to his latest years, was deep, unfailing, 
as fresh and joyous in the latest as in the earliest. 
But I find little trace of a minute knowledge of 
nature in his writing and recall little in his talk. 
He does not betray the intimate acquaintance with 
facts or the acute interest in them that Lowell dis- 
closes on every one of so many pages. He easily 
might have been, though I do not know that he 
was, ignorant of the names or relations of the flow- 
ers and unable to tell more than the very general 
characteristics of the trees that gave him such ex- 
quisite pleasure. There was little of the naturalist 



72 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

in him. It was, if I may venture to say so, the 
generic beauty of nature that appealed to him — 
the landscape, not its features, the glory of the day 
or night, the sweep of the horizon, the mood of 
the sea, the sky, the valleys or hills or groves that 
lay about him. " The palm-grove," he writes, " is 
always enchanted. If it stretch inland too allur- 
ingly, and you run ashore to stand under the bend- 
ing boughs, to share the peace of the doves swing- 
ing in the golden twilight, yet you will never reach 
the grove. You will gain the trees, but it is not 
the grove you fancied — that golden gloom will 
never be gained — it is an endless El Dorado 
gleaming along the shores. The separate columnar 
trunks ray out in foliage above, but there is no 
shade of a grove, no privacy of a wood, except, in- 
deed, at sunset, — ' A privacy .of glorious light.' " 
It was the grove and not the trees that would sat- 
isfy him, and throughout his later work as in these 
first books, the reader feels the curious charm of 
the completeness and strength of his integral im- 
pressions. His vision disclosed pictures, not ob- 
jects, and with whatever care and skill and patient 
workmanship he wrought them, it was not objects 
but pictures that he presented. 

The second quality that I have noted, the 
rhythm of his expression, is clearly allied to the 
first. Curtis seems to me to have been, in an im- 
portant sense, born an orator. Even the words of 
these first pages read as if they had been thought 
aloud, as if their cadence had been realized to the 



THE HOWADJI BOOKS. 73 

ear in the sound of his own rare voice. Often 
they come to the mind like the singing of the soli- 
tary and unconscious singer. His passionate and 
constant delight in music shaped his phrases and 
marshaled his sentences. There are plentiful in- 
stances of excess in this indulgence in the oriental 
books, before his taste had been trained and his 
judgment enlightened, but the excess is incidental 
— accidental even — and the sense remains to the 
reader of a pure, sincere and constant joy in the 
music of his own expression. I merely remark 
here these characteristics, which in more and more 
highly developed form, are found in all his work, 
and lent to it, in his maturity, much of the charm 
that won his host of readers and hearers, and of 
the completeness and force that held them. 



CHAPTER VI. 

LECTURER AND MAGAZINE WRITER. 

Before he had completed " Nile Notes " Curtis 
had made his venture in the lecturing field. The 
first lecture seems to have been given in his na- 
tive city of Providence, whence I find him inquir- 
ing about the next "Assembly" — not a Legisla- 
tive gathering — at Boston, and announcing that 
though he must " repeat " his " lecture " on the 
"26th February " " he firmly intends to come back 
for the Fancy Ball." In the spring, Horace Gree- 
ley having gone to Europe, he went " on " the " Tri- 
bune " where, April 14th, he writes that he is " al- 
ready in labor with the critiques upon the Academy 
Exhibition." His work was varied, what in news- 
paper parlance is known as " general utility," the 
art notices, music, reading manuscript and foreign 
papers, writing paragraphs and now and then a 
" leader," described by one of his companions in 
the office as " clever, agreeable, bright, never vio- 
lent or ugly." Some of the gentlemen on whose 
work he passed judgment were not so lenient. 
" The artists," he writes, in June '51, " are angry 
with me, some of them. R thinks I am mali- 
cious — Ye Gods ! — and considers what I say of 



LECTURER AND MAGAZINE WRITER. 75 

Hicks Impolitic ! Well, I shall invite Dogberry to 
comprehend these vagrom men, — I give it up." 
The companion quoted above thinks that Curtis was 
" not a hard or very steady worker at that time. 
He took the world easy and amused himself a good 
deal." Curtis's own impression was quite differ- 
ent. When urged to buy a share in the Tribune 
property and permanently unite himself with the 
enterprise, he declined. " I shrink," he wrote, 
" from the utter slavery of such a life. I have no 
moment of day or night properly my own. If I 
hear a concert, or a lecture, if I go, as to-night, to 
the Cooper Commemoration, it is all to be written 
out — every bit of experience must be grist to this 
imperious mill. I fear that every personal and 
more interesting ambition or intent must be sacri- 
ficed to this incessant employment." And again, 

"H is terribly lazy, which to me — who await 

foreign papers at the office until 2 A. M. and then 
reel, drunk with sleep, homeward to correct Syrian 
proofs, which startle me with the languid, sunny 
repose they recall — is the unpardonable sin." 

In the summer of 1851 came a long respite. 
" Soon," he writes in July, " I shall spread sheeny 
vans for flight — Niagara, Sharon, Berkshire, Na- 
hant, Newport and general bliss ad infinitum.''^ 
These journey in gs were the occasion of a series of 
letters to the " Tribune," afterward published under 
the title of " Lotus Eating," linking them thus to 
the Howadji books. The little volume was illus- 
trated with pleasant woodcuts from sketches by his 



76 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

warm friend Kensett, and was quite as successful 
as anything of the kind could be. There is much 
still to enjoy in its notes of a life that has quite 
passed away, and though the little volume was es- 
sentially ephemeral, in form and purpose, it gives 
clear signs of the two tendencies of the writer 
which were to be embodied in " The Potiphar 
Papers " published the next year, and in " Prue 
and I " four vears later. It bears marks also of 
the weariness with which Curtis's mind necessarily 
reacted from the rather feverish social life in which 
he had plunged, and which overtaxed his strength, 
on which large demands were made by his really 
laborious pursuit of his profession, and shows still 
other marks of varied personal experiences, which 
deeply affected him at the time and contributed to 
the development of his character. 

In the autumn he went to Providence to com- 
plete the preparation of the Howadji in Syria. 
Among his letters from there, I find one to his 
father, commenting on Judge Curtis's charge to 
the grand jury of the United States Court on the 
crime of treason ; the treason consisting in resisting 
the return of fugitive slaves. It is so clear-cut 
and firm in its reasoning that I quote it as showing 
in what direction his mind moved on the question. 
Referring to the Judge's declaration of the uniform 
and absolute authority of law, Curtis writes : — 

"He forgot that the inherent human weakness 
which makes laws necessary also affects the essen- 
tial character of those laws, and that there may be 



LECTURER AND MAGAZINE WRITER. 11 

a legal organization of society worse than social 
chaos. The very oath by which we bind ourselves, 
as officers of the human law, is the direct recogni- 
tion of a higher and more solemn obligation, and 
the point where the citizen merges in the man he 
did not consider, apparently, a point for his no- 
tice ; yet that is the essential point of the difficulty. 
Nobody denies the obligations of the law, but laws 
may be irretrievably bad, as in the case of the 
Roman Emperors, as now in Italy under the 
Austrian rule ; and by no obligation is a man 
bound to regard them. In fact this pro-fugitive 
slave law movement and the doctrine of law at all 
hazards, is, in politics, the same damnation that 
the infallibility of the Romish church is in re- 
ligion, and wherever, as with us, the tendency of 
the times is to individual and private judgment, 
the cause of the wrong is just as much lost in 
politics as it is in Religion. 

" All these things, which good order and com- 
mon sense and patriotism require to be discussed 
publicly by our judges and legislators, they all 
shirk, and, emphasizing the obvious, cry Victory ! 
Thus William Goddard said to me : ' What a fine 
charge ' — * Yes,' I said, ' but there is something 
more.' " 

For the next few years Mr. Curtis led a varied 
life. He formed a more or less close connection 
with the house of Harper and Brothers, who had 
published his books ; wrote sketches and social notes 
for the Magazine, of which Henry J. Raymond 



78 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

was then the editor, and for the Weekly, in which 
he started the department of the Lounger ; became 
an associate, but subordinate editor of " Putnam's 
Magazine," to which he was a regular contributor ; 
gave a good many lectures, mostly on books, and 
went often and much into society, the gayeties as 
well as the richer fruits of which he enjoyed with 
great zest. The work for the Harper periodicals 
was of many sorts. In part it was slight comment 
on the pictures, the plays, the players and singers 
of the day, on the incidents of the life of New 
York, more interesting in some ways than now and 
much more easily grasped. Some of it was, how- 
ever, serious enough, and from time to time the 
notes on men and events in Europe showed a firm 
touch and a clear intelligent vision. In the social 
articles, under the light and rather sentimental 
surface treatment, there was a strong tone of mo- 
rality. In one of his longer paragraphs, he wrote 
of Thackeray : " He seems to be the one of all 
authors who takes life precisely as he finds it. If 
he finds it sad, he makes it sad : if gay, gay. You 
discover in him the flexible adaptability of Horace, 
but with a deep and consuming sadness which the 
Roman never knew, and which in the Englishman 
seems to be almost sentimentality." This I im- 
agine describes pretty nearly the Thackeray that 
Mr. Curtis deeply loved and admired, and to whom 
he yielded the tribute of more or less conscious 
imitation. The sadness in the younger man was 
not so real, the seeming sentimentality was rather 



LECTURER AND MAGAZINE WRITER. 79 

more obvious, but was a passing indulgence for a 
mind not yet sufficiently settled to be as earnest and 
genuine as it could and was to be, not yet having 
found the object that could be pursued resolutely 
enough to prevent the influence of Thackeray's 
manner, rather than of Thackeray's purpose. 

In these days Mr. Curtis wrote verse and a con- 
siderable amount of it. He even contemplated " a 
volume of poems with Ticknor," and he delivered 
a number of "poems" at college commencements. 
These are not, so far as I have been able to find 
them, of a high order. They were smooth enough, 
and in passages they were what was then known as 
" elegant," fashioned on the model of the Queen 
Anne poets, but they seem so foreign to the char- 
acter of his mind as it afterward developed most 
strongly, that I should never recognize one of 
them as his from internal evidence. He had no 
fondness for the work and no pride in it. " I 'm 
not a poet," he wrote, " and I wish they would n't 
ask. But as that is the worst excuse for not writ- 
ing verse, I consent." In this as in other directions, 
he was trying his wings. If they did not sustain 
him in long flights, he was distinctly successful in 
short ones, and there are several songs ^ that are 

1 Here are two selections : — 

THE REAPER. 

I walked among the golden grain 
That bent and whispered to the plain, 
" How gaily the sweet summer passes, 
So gently treading o'er us grasses.'' 



80 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

exquisite in form, and tender and touching in feel- 
ing. Had he devoted to this art the time and labor 
necessary to the full unfolding of his powers, he 
might easily have ranked high. I cannot regret 
that he did not. He would at best have been one 
of no small number, and he could hardly have 
achieved the work he afterward performed. 

A sad-eyed Reaper came that way, 
But silent in the singing day, — 
Laying the graceful grain along 
That met the sickle with a song. 

The sad-eyed Reaper said to me, 
" Fair are the summer fields you see ; 
Golden to-day — to-morrow gray ; 
So dies young love from life away." 

** 'T is reaped, but it is garnered well," 

I ventured the sad man to tell ; 
" Though Love declines yet Heaven is kind, 

God knows his sheaves of life to bind." 

More sadly then he bowed his head, 
And sadder were the words he said, — 
" Tho' every summer green the plain, 
This harvest cannot bloom again." 

EGYPTIAN SERENADE. 

Sing again the song you sung 
When we were together young — 
When there were but you and I 
Underneath the summer sky. 

Sing the song, and o'er and o'er, 
Though I know that nevermore 
Will it seem the song you sung 
When we were together young. 



LECTURER AND MAGAZINE WRITER, 81 

Before he returned from Europe, he had formed 
the project of a life of Mehemet Ali, to whom one 
of the last chapters of the " Howadji in Syria " is 
given. He pursued it with much seriousness for 
several years, but finally gave it up. " Frankly," 
he said, " the motive that held me loyal to it is not 
the best : it was the desire to do something which, by 
the orthodox and received standard, should be con- 
ceded to be a graver work than anything I have 
done. But the reason is puerile, although the senti- 
ment is good." One thing which led him to drop 
the task undoubtedly was the conviction, as he 
wrote, that Mehemet Ali "was only a soldier of 
fortune, a condottiere upon the splendid scale, 
whose success was purely personal and therefore 
transitory." Such a subject could not keep Mr. 
Curtis up to his work. He was not a story-teller, 
not an artist in historical painting. The litterateur 
was already in bonds to the moralist. 

His connection with " Putnam's Magazine " was 
in some ways extremely fortunate. It gave him 
work of a kind that he enjoyed and did well. It 
extended his acquaintance ^ with the men of letters 

1 The following is a note from Mr. Godwin's address upon Mr. 
Curtis delivered to the Century Club : — 

" It may interest those who are curious as to our literary history 
to add, that among our promised contributors — the most of whom 
complied with their promises — were Irving, Bryant, Emerson, 
Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne, Thoreau, George Ripley, Miss 
Sedgwick, Mrs. Kirkland, author of A New Home : Who HI fol- 
low ? J. P. Kennedy, author of Swallow Barn ; Fred S. Coz- 
zens, of the Sparrowgrass Papers ; Richard Grant White, * Shake- 
speare's scholar;' Edmund Quincy, author of Twice Married; 



82 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. ^ 

of the day. His intimate association with Charles 
r. Briggs, the chief in the office, and with Parke 
Godwin, his associate, was a healthful and fruitful 
one, for both were men of fine fibre and strong pur- 
pose. Especially the connection gave him a fairly 
defined objective for his activity, and one requiring 
sustained and concentrated attention. 

Parke Godwin, in his "Commemorative Address" 
before the Century Association, gives some remi- 
niscences of the Putnam s' days. Referring to 
"The Potiphar Papers" and to "Prue and I," he 
says : — 

" It was evidence of the fecundity and versatility 
of Mr. Curtis's gifts that while he was thus carry- 
ing forward two distinct lines of invention — the one 
full of broad comic effects, and the other of exqui- 
site ideals — he was contributing to the entertain- 

William Swinton, since the accomplished historian of The Army 
of the Potomac ; Eiehard Kimball, Herman Melville, of ' Ty- 
pee ' and * Omoo ' fame, Richard Henry Stoddard, E. C. Sted- 
man, Ellsworth, Thomas Buchanan Read, Maria Lowell, Jer- 
vis McEntee, and others. We had a strong hacking" from the 
clergy, — the Rev. Drs. Hawks, Vinton, Hanson, Bethune, Baird ; 
also the occasional assistance of Arthur Hugh Clough, the friend 
of Tom Hughes, Matthew Arnold, and other pupils of Dr. Arnold, 
who was then in the country ; William Henry Herbert, reputed 
grandson of the Earl of Pembroke, sportsman and naturalist, 
known as Frank Forrester ; William North, a frank and brilliant 
young Englishman ; Fitz James O'Brien, who died in our War for 
the Union ; and Thomas Francis Meagher, a gallant soldier in the 
same war, and afterwards governor of Montana. Miss Delia Bacon, 
whose unhappy history is told by Hawthorne in Our Old Home, 
began her eccentric Shakespeare-Bacon controversy by a learned 
and brilliant article in the Monthly." 



LECTURER AND MAGAZINE WRITER. 83 

merit of our public in a half dozen other different 
modes, — monthly criticisms of music and the drama 
that broadened the scope and raised the tone of 
that form of writing ; rippling Venetian songs that 
had the swing of the gondola in them ; crispy short 
stories of humor or pathos ; reminiscences of the 
Alps taken from his Swiss diaries ; elaborate re- 
views of books, like Dickens's ' Bleak House,' the 
Bronte novels, Dr. Veron's ' Memoires,' ' Hiawatha,' 
and recent English poetry, including that of Kings- 
ley, Matthew Arnold, Thackeray, the Brownings 
and Tennyson, which, written forty years ago, 
have not been surpassed since by more appreciative, 
discriminating, and sympathetic criticism, even in 
that masterly and more elaborate book of our fel- 
low-member, ' The Victorian Poets.' In addition 
to these he gave us, from time to time, solid and 
thoughtful discussions of ' Men of Character,' of 
' Manners,' of ' Fashion,' of the ' Minuet and the 
Polka ' as social tide - marks, and of ' Rachel,' 
which may still be read with instruction and pleas- 
ure for their keen observation, their nice critical 
discernment, their cheerful philosophy, and their 
entrancing charms of style. 

" Then, ever and anon, Mr. Curtis would be off 
for a week or two, delivering lectures on ' Sir 
Philip Sidney,' on ' The Genius of Dickens,' on 
'The Position of Women,' and in one case a 
course of lectures in Boston and in New York on 
'Contemporary Fiction.' In a galaxy of lectur- 
ers which included Emerson, Phillips, Beecher, 



84 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

Chapin, Henry Giles, and others, lie was a bright 
particular star, and everywhere a favorite. A 
harder-working literary man I never knew : he was 
incessantly busy, a constant, careful, and wide 
reader, yet never missing a great meeting or a 
great address, or a grand night at the theatre. 
From our little conclaves at No. 10 Park Place, 
where, I fear, we remorselessly slaughtered the 
hopes of many a bright spirit (chiefly female) he 
was seldom absent, and when he came he took his 
full share of the routine, unless Irving, Bryant, 
Lowell, Thackeray, or Longfellow sauntered in, and 
'that day we worked no more.' " 

A few letters of this time from Curtis to Briggs 
give glimpses of the various life to which Mr. God- 
win refers. He writes, December of 1853, from 
Milwaukee : — 

My dear deluded Eastern, — Why do you 
stay in that dried-up, old-f ogyish East ? A man is 
nothing if not a squatter upon the prairies ; for, my 

dearest B , I have seen a prairie, I have darted 

all day across a prairie, I have been near the Mis- 
sissippi, I have been invited to Iowa, which lies 
somewhere over the western horizon. I feel as all 
the people feel in novels, — I confess the West ! 
Great it is and greatly to be praised. 

Yesterday the almanac said December, but the 
sun said May, as we rolled out of Chicago to- 
wards the Mississippi. There was a boundless sky 
and a boundless earth. It was the old feeling of 



LECTURER AND MAGAZINE WRITER. 85 

the desert minus the romance of association, minus 
history and the Arabian Nights. But if you could 
fancy the sun relenting, and blessing instead of 
blasting the wide level of the earth, then, having 
seen the desert, you would know the prairie. 

I feel that I am on my travels once more. De- 
troit (where I delivered two lectures, had an ova- 
tion, was requested to stay and deliver more, and 
was magnificently lionized, and roared in my most 
dulcet tones) has drifted into the East. 

In the East the note is equally gay : — 

Boston, January 20, '54. 

A being who whirls in a round of routs, din- 
ners, and visits, who, as his friend Tom Appleton 
says, " nightly vomits fire and ribbons for the satis- 
faction of gaping multitudes, who is taken to balls, 
and rushes into small fishing towns to fascinate 
the alewives — who betakes himself with his rush- 
light to illuminate small villages whereunto gas has 
never been previously brought," — has little time 
for sublunary pursuits. Don't dream of a line 
from me until I fly these syren east winds and 
heavy rains, these beautiful women and hospitable 
men. To-morrow I go to the Longfellows, and I 
will write you a line soon again, that you may know 
that the rose-leaf has not been utterly fatah 

My lecture? Oh, yes, it was fine. The hall 
was crammed ; see the " Transcript " of last night. 
I was immediately asked to deliver another, in the 
Monday evening course, but was too wise to accept. 



86 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

From Cambridge, whitlier he had gone to pre- 
pare one of his articles for the " Homes of Ameri- 
can Authors," he writes : — 

Craigie House, June 8, '54. 

I am staying now with the poet and his wife. 
What though it rains, or shines ? It is quite the 
same to me. I sit and look over the melancholy 
meadows at the winding Charles, and quote my host, 
or, which is better, I contemplate my hostess, and 
thank God for the gracious and beautiful woman 
for whom, clearly, the woods, flowers, the stars, 
suns, and men were created. 

Lowell, the neighboring poet (the P's prevail 
in Cambridge, — Poets, Philosophers, and Profes- 
sors of religion and other things), is busy with a 
sketch of Keats, which must be done to-morrow. 

It is for Professor , of Boston, editor of the 

"English Poets." Professor is one of the 

cleverest and best of the Cambridge men. He has 
just been to Holyoke, and brought home a worm 
more brilliant than Herrick's glow-worm or the 
Cuban curculio. 

I write you in Washington's chamber. The tiles 
adorn my fireplace. But I am lazy and thick- 
headed. 

He spent three months of 1854 at Newport, which 
he calls " my country, where my airiest castles are 
built and my fairest estates lie." I give, as they 
run, a half dozen of letters to Mr. Briggs from 
there : — 



LECTURER AND MAGAZINE WRITER. 87 

Newport, June 29, '54. 
I have left the poets behind, and awake amidst 
great historians and by the Poluphloisboio Tha- 
lasses. Lowell sends as much love as one man can 
send to another. Longfellow and his wife accom- 
panied me even to the cars, and I came slipping 
along in the most gorgeous of summer sunsets, and 
found myself in the most perfect of climates, with 
a lofty compassion for those who celebrate the 
savage shores of Staten Island. Lowell is coming 
here in July to visit the Nortons, who arrive to-day. 
Your particular friends Evert and George D. were 
going out of the historian's house as I came in. I 
see their figures fluttering upon the edge of the 
cliff over the sea. They will be restored to your 
longing heart to-morrow, for they leave to-night. 

Newport, July 7, '54. 
My young friend Curtis is here, immensely tick- 
led to see his sentimental phiz in Putnam, and 
struggling with a poem! All the fools are not 
dead yet, it seems. But I, who have lived a lie for 
thirty years, — I, whose life was a riper romance 
than the most imaginative of these idiots can invent, 
— must laugh at that simple ass, Curtis, who is actu- 
ally screwing out a poem in the regular old heroic 
style. It is a great pity that young men should 
waste themselves on literature and what not, in- 
stead of building steamers and laying up riches, 
like my best of friends, or speculating on the great 
scale, like my worst enemy. Curtis tells me he has 



88 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

written to Keiisett to come here and stop, and give 
up that silly Saguenay business for the present. 

If he does I will let you know, for your friend 
and chaplain, Dr. Choules, tells me that you are the 
friend of all loafers and give them passages, and I 
know not what else. 

Aquidneck, July 12, '54. 
For newspapers and editorial discrimination I 
have acquired the prof oundest reverence, from hav- 
ing been half a year " upon " the " Tribune " and by 
having dined semi-occasionally with the Press Club. 
That editors are wise as well as witty, sagacious as 
well as sonorous, and as full of feeling as of fancy, 
are three alliterative facts of which I consider my- 
self amply assured. And yet, spite of their witty 
wisdom, I love the loafers, the scapegraces, the sin- 
ners. I, too, am a Bohemian. 

Newport, July 23, '54. 
That a man who did n't like Ijawrence's head of 
Lowell and of Longfellow should admire the print 
of a beatified barber and irreproachable steam- 
boat captain, which Hueston meant to publish as 
my likeness, was perfectly natural, only in future I 
am sure you will permit me to laugh out loud at 
your artistic admirations and censures. It is also 
entirely rational and to be naturally expected that 
you should be supported in your commendation of 
a melancholy libel by such eminent connoisseurs as 
were quoted to me by name in connection with your 



LECTURER AND MAGAZINE WRITER. 89 

own, I am sorry that you will be deprived of the 
pleasure of having me in my favorite character of 
reformed George Barnwell, set in gold, with a cir- 
clet of Clark's hair worn in your cherishing bosom ; 
for I have written Mr. Knickerbocker Hueston 
that, rather than make my bow to the world in such 
an unexceptionable coiffure, etc., I would snatch up 
my story and decamp from the " gallery." 
You are a high old humbug. 

Aquidneck (Isle of Peace and Plenty), 
August 10, '54. 

My dear fkiend Zaccheus, — Please climb 
a tree and consider the denizens of Newport, how 
they loaf ; they write not, neither do they read ; and 
yet I say unto you that Solomon with all his 
concubines had not a better time. Time goes I 
know not where, I care not how. Upon cool morn- 
ing piazzas I sit talking with the Muses, in warm 
evening parlors I rush dancing with the Graces. 
Two hundred carriages with the dust of eight hun- 
dred wheels throng to Bateman's in the afternoon, 
or, dustless and delicious, prance along the hard 
bottom of the sea, or far out upon the island, driv- 
ing the genial Kensett. We look back across woods, 
and meadows white to the harvest, and see the pic- 
ture of peace and plenty framed in the soft sapphire 
of the sea. There are no end of pretty women. 
At the Bellevue dance on Monday I saw more really 
lovely girls than often fall to the lot of anybody's 
less than a sultan's eyes. Baltimore is especially 



90 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

brilliant. There are Southern women also, all 
wrong upon the great Question ! ! ! — wronger and 
more unreasonable, but more courteous, than the 

men. Bob J is here dancing with all the 

girls, and sometimes so drunk that he cannot move 
across the floor. / dance and people say, " I 
thought you hated it." " I love it, madam ! " " Yes, 
like other men, you say one thing and do another." 
" Pardon, most lovely of women, I write and say 
what I think. I have never been treacherous to 
my love of the dance." 

Aquidneck (Isle of Peace), October 9, '54. 

Where are you this bland Sunday morning? 
These great, gorgeous days chase each other through 
these spacious skies and die in unspeakable splen- 
dor along the sea. I am going- to church, because 
I shall hear a man of earnest and solemn feeling 
chant a kind of religious reverie which his congre- 
gation love, but I am sure do not understand. 
The people, also, look calm and pious. There is 
not too strong a sense of millinery. Now that the 
flood-tide has fallen away from these shores of 
fashion, the pearls glisten in the sunshine. 

I shall come home about the 23d of October, 
write a lecture, be away at the West in December, 
home in January, away at the East in February, 
and home in March. I mean to lecture during two 
months and make two thousand dollars. I have 
put my price up to fifty dollars. 



CHAPTER Vn. 

" THE POTIPHAR PAPERS ; " " PRUE AND I. 



yy 



Trom Mr. Curtis's work for " Putnam's Maga- 
zine " came two volumes by which he is, perhaps, 
even better known in American letters than by the 
Howadji books, " The Potiphar Papers " and " Prue 
and I." " It was while providing entertainment for 
our readers in a second number," says Mr. Parke 
Godwin, " that the vivacious Harry Franco (Charles 
r. Briggs, the editor-in-chief) exclaimed, ' I have 
it ! Let us each write an article on the state of 
parties. You, Howadji, who hang a little candle 
in the naughty world of fashion, will show it up 
in that light.' Mr. Curtis ... at once wrote a 
paper on the state of parties, which he called ' Our 
Best Society.' It was a severe criticism of the fol- 
lies, foibles, and affectations of those circles which 
got their guests, as they did their edibles and car- 
riages, from Brown, Sexton and Caterer, and which 
thought unlimited supplies of terrapin and cham- 
pagne the test and summit of hospitality. Tren- 
chant as it was, it was yet received with applause. 
Some thought the name of the leading lady more 
suggestive than facts warranted, and that in such 
phrases as ' rampant vulgarity in Brussels lace,' 



92 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

'the orgies of rotten Corinth,' and 'the frenzied 
festival of Rome in her decadence,' the brush was 
overloaded. None the less, the satire delighted the 
public, and was soon followed by other papers in 
the same vein, since collected as 'The Potiphar 
Papers.' The older folks acknowledged them to 
be the best things of the kind since Irving and his 
friends had taken the town with the whim-whams 
and conceits of Evergreen Wizard and the Cock- 
loft family. They were to some extent exaggera- 
tions, in which occasional incidents were given as 
permanent features ; but their high and earnest 
purpose, their genuine humor, their amusing de- 
tails, their hits at characters, and their sarcasms 
deodorized of offensive personality by constant 
drippings from the springs of fancy, won them 
great favor. If we behind the screen sometimes 
felt that we shook hands with Kurz Pacha and the 
Reverend Cream Cheese, they were, like sweet bully 
Bottom, ' marvelously translated.' " 

I suppose that this summary of the impressions 
of a contemporary and a companion gives a fair 
view of the way in which " The Potiphar Papers," 
at the time of their appearance, affected intelligent 
minds familiar with the society of the day. There 
is plenty of evidence of the interest they excited. 
They had great vogue, and greatly helped the 
young magazine, while they brought to their writer 
much notoriety and some fame. As was natural, 
they made " hard feelings " among those who were, 
or thought they were, satirized in these pages ; but 



THE POTIPHAR PAPERS; PRUE AND I. 93 

on the whole they were greatly enjoyed, and their 
healthy purpose was recognized. Taken up now 
after forty years, a reader must be well through 
middle age to recognize their substantial basis of 
fact, and, so far as they survive, it is as satire on 
the one hand and a picture of the author's mind 
on the other, rather than as a description of society. 
Yet a description of society they really were, with 
a sadly substantial basis of fact. Mr. Curtis's own 
letters and those of his contemporaries, and the re- 
collections of men who moved in the same circles, 
are not lacking in evidence that the brush was not 
very heavily overloaded. It was a period of swift 
money-making, when a great and increasing crowd 
of men and women were rapidly gaining the means 
for a life without work, and for the luxuries and in- 
dulgences that had previously been within the reach 
only of inherited wealth. To get money was rela- 
tively easy. It was a matter of energy and shrewd- 
ness amid abounding opportunities. To spend 
money rationally or with refinement was something 
far different, for which neither nature nor training 
had fitted the possessors, and for which the con- 
ditions of success in getting it had particularly un- 
fitted them. The spending, like the getting, became 
an affair of competition, and in both it was quan- 
tity that told. But the latter competition was largely 
intrusted to the women, and they were, far less than 
their husbands, subjected to strong conventions, 
and wrought their wayward purpose with irrespon- 
sible, unenlightened, feverish energy. In such con- 



94 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

ditions Mesdames Potiphar and Croesus and Gnu, 
Mr. Gauche Boosey and Miss Caroline Petitoes be- 
came not only possible or probable, but actual, so 
far as their conception of life goes, or their mode 
of acting. While, therefore, " The Potiphar Pa- 
pers " are not pleasant reading for the children and 
grandchildren of the class represented in their 
pages, I should advise no one to put the book aside 
with the notion that it is a greatly exaggerated 
or even a particularly strongly colored account of 
what went on under the eyes of the writer. 

If the book is to be considered independently of 
its accuracy, it must appear very uneven. The best 
parts of it by far are the serious parts, — the com- 
ment of the artist rather than the figures he draws. 
The spirit of the author is of one intense indignation, 
of anger and revolt and sorrow, at the unworthiness 
of what he depicts. Nurtured himself in the pure 
idealism of intellectual and moral New England, 
yet with a keen and warm delight in the joys — 
the sensuous as well as the spiritual and emotional 
joys — of life, bringing from wide travel and varied 
society an eager zest for the happiest and the best, 
a patriot moreover in every fibre of his being, with 
a sensitive pride in his native land and high hopes 
of what it might be, a high standard of what it 
should be, all doors flung wide open to his budding 
fame and his charming personality, Curtis was 
deeply moved by what he saw of greed and vulgar- 
ity and coarse display, and the unseemly strife in 
money-spending. The opening chapter, " Our Best 



THE POTIPHAR PAPERS; PRUE AND L 95 

Society," expresses this feeling, and on some ac- 
counts it might have been better had he stopped 
with that. On some accounts, but not on the whole ; 
for there is so much of good sense, so much fair- 
ness, humor, wit, philosophy in the other papers that 
it would have been a pity to lose them. As satire, 
however, they cannot be called highly successful. 
They fall distinctly below that of Thackeray, on 
which they are more or less consciously fashioned. 
Their bitterness is not caustic enough ; the under- 
tone of gravity is not deep enough; the fancy, 
though subtle and delicate, is not sustained or con- 
sistent, and the light dramatic machinery adopted 
does not work smoothly. Particularly the charac- 
ters are not alive with any sense of reality. The 
reader is now and then puzzled and even annoyed 
by their variation from the types for which they are 
intended to stand. They frequently excite pity, 
but not sympathy. All of which means only that 
Curtis was not a creative writer, and, considering 
how small a part of his writing was in this direc- 
tion, that is not a very important criticism. It 
would be, indeed, hardly worth making, were it 
not that in this instance the choice of a form not 
giving free scope to his strongest qualities, but 
cramping and slightly distorting their effect, ob- 
scures somewhat the real value of the work, which 
is substantial. That value comes from the force 
and elevation of the writer's purpose. It was 
no small thing in those days that a man of his 
knowledge and insight, wielding a pen of such sin- 



96 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

gular charm, reaching so wide a class of intelligent 
readers, should have worked out that purpose in 
the way in which he worked it out, should have 
set in the pillory by the wayside the vices of a soci- 
ety unquestionably fascinating to many, and, with 
every word of scorn or ridicule or irony that he 
cast at them, should have made plainer and more 
respected the high ideals which they violated. As 
the satirist is not always the moralist, but is some- 
times the hopeless cynic, wearying and discourag- 
ing and depressing the manhood and womanhood 
of his readers, I do not take it to be a serious qual- 
ification of Mr. Curtis's position in literature that 
he was not eminently a satirist. And as the sound 
moralist, however he may elect or be impelled to do 
his work, does work that lasts and blesses while it 
lasts, I find in this volume a service for which we 
may well be thankful, for which I feel deeply thank- 
ful, knowing that its influence was not only whole- 
some but strong and wide. Many a young man, 
reading the papers from month to month, found 
erected between him and the temptation of a frivo- 
lous and essentially low life the light but not easily 
disregarded barrier of the scorn of a guide who was 
at once a moralist, a philosopher, and an accom- 
plished gentleman. 

The second of the books issuing from the pages 
of Putnam's was " Prue and I." I am glad again 
to cite the words of Mr. Godwin, who says that 
" Mr. Franco and his colleague of the triumvirate 
used to look forward to these delightful papers as 



THE POTIPHAR PAPERS; PRUE AND I. 97 

one does to a romance to be continued ; and when 
we received one of them, we chirruped over it, as if 
by some strange merit of our own we had entrapped 
a sunbeam," Sunbeams unfading they are, and I 
believe will be for long years yet to come, — ten- 
der, gay, rich, sweet, life-giving, touching the clouds 
that gather at evening with hues as lovely as those 
that ushered in the dawn. It is well-nigh forty years 
since '^ Prue and I " came to me, one of the innum- 
erous books of my boyhood, and was my frequent 
companion in long strolls over the autumn hills or 
among the woods of spring. No year of the two- 
score has passed, I think, that the book has not been 
read again, and every year its subtle charm has 
grown more charming and more subtle. Had Curtis 
written only this, — had this alone represented to 
the world the character and gifts, the aspirations and 
the attainments, of the man, — his fame in one sense 
would rather have gained than suffered, because he 
would always have been associated with this singu- 
larly perfect production. I can imagine how we 
might then have mourned the fate that deprived us 
of further fruit of so rare a sort, and might have 
set ourselves to fancy how he would have developed, 
what sound wisdom, what serene dignity, what beau- 
tiful loyalty to the best and purest, what fine and 
delicate range of a warm and chaste imagination 
would have unfolded in the riper and wider work of 
the author of "Prue and I." It is one of the curious 
effects of the limits nature sets to even our mental 
appetites, that when what would have been but the 



98 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

imagined achievements of this author have become 
realities, and have multiplied through a long and 
fertile life, the fame that these have won for him is 
less distinct than the one book would have given 
him. Not less firm, certainly, nor less admirable, 
but less distinct ; so that I find the book, with very 
many, an incidental association with Curtis's mem- 
ory, and not, as it has grown to be with me, largely 
the embodiment, the type of all associations. I 
like to think that it was with this book in his mind 
that Lowell wrote : " Had letters kept you, every 
wreath were yours." For it seems to me that in 
this book there is more of the man, of the thinker, 
dreamer, artist, and moralist, than anywhere else 
in the great mass of his writings. And indeed, it 
could not but be very genuine. Here is no elab- 
oration of years, no polished and repolished gem, 
slowly and carefully wrought with critical reflec- 
tion and matured art. Here are a scant half dozen 
magazine articles, filling a couple of hundred of 
small pages, written with rushing pen, amid varied 
and pressing occupations, at times in the stolen mo- 
ments of hurried journeys, and never in the calm of 
deliberate industry. What was put on paper was 
what sprang from the unforced mind. From the 
conditions of their writing the papers were a species 
of improvisation, and I think that in great part to 
that is due their unity and strength amid such rich 
variety, such bold and unreined fancy. What we 
get is the man, everywhere and always, nothing less 
or other. 



THE POTIPHAR PAPERS; PRUE AND L 99 

In '' Prue and I " the dramatic machinery, un- 
like that of " The Potiphar Papers," runs with en- 
tire ease. It is very slight and the persons are few 
— the old book-keeper and his immortal wife, Tit- 
bottom, and Bourne the millionaire. The motive 
is by no means very novel. The reflections of a 
philosopher of moderate or scant means upon the 
fortunes, successes, failures, realities, and shams 
of his fellow-beings have been written for ages in 
manjT- tongues. The compensations for the deficien- 
cies of life to be got from a lively imagination, the 
advantages of fancied adventure over the uncertain 
and trying reality, the riches of the world of books 
to him whose only possession — save a contented 
mind — they are, have been sung and painted ever 
since the favors of fortune began to vary the 
conditions of men. So far from being novel, the 
general theme of the book may be called danger- 
ously hackneyed, and has spread pitfalls of com- 
monplace in the way of numberless writers old 
and young. The world of readers yawns at the 
memory of the weary platitudes with which it has 
strewn the pages of books since before the inven- 
tion of printing. But if the theme be not novel it 
is because the contrasts of life are as old as the 
race, and men who think at all are forced in one 
vein or another to think of them. It is the dis- 
tinction of Curtis that his thought of them is so 
sweet, so sound, so subtle in its insight, broadly 
wise, gracious and luminous in its expression, es- 
sentially noble in spirit. It is not merely or chiefly 



100 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

the delight of the artist in the harmony brought 
out of variety that the author feels as he works in 
with rich fancy the different characters and scenes. 
It is deep and tranquil joy in the substance of pur- 
ity, kindness, justice, and love which these vari- 
ations illustrate. The modest and faithful and 
unimaginative Prue is the real inspiration of the 
piece. One feels that her love of poetry, her pleas- 
ure in the fine things of the finest books which her 
husband reads to her with glowing or tear-dimmed 
eyes, her enjoyment of the sunsets so magical, 
so infinitely suggestive to him, are almost purely 
sympathetic, are born of her love for him, and in 
the quaint humor, with which her husband admits 
this to himself and to his readers, one feels also that 
the love of this pure and gentle woman is the real 
thing before whose gracious radiance the splendors 
of nature and literature and imagination pale their 
ineffectual fire. 

If the writer peoples the world of wealth and 
fashion, which he assumes to watch from afar off, 
with beautiful women whose " beauty is heaven's 
stamp upon virtue ;" if he makes of his own fancy 
the ideal cavalier w^hose perfect reverence and grace 
and manly purity match the qualities of the woman, 
he never permits the suspicion that the reality is 
not possible : he only insists that, unless the reality 
is there, luxury is no better than poverty, and that 
true manliness and womanliness are common to all 
conditions. There is no suggestion of a sneer in 
the smile with which he greets the carriage of Au- 



THE POTIPHAR PAPERS; PRUE AND I, 101 

relia, and describes his own misadventure with the 
" wrinkled Eve" whose apple-stand tempted him to 
his fall. The smile suggests, indeed, the ephemeral 
nature of Aurelia's social advantages, and. even of 
her youthful beauty, and implies that the accidents 
of poverty are not of any more permanent serious- 
ness than those of riches ; but that is not because 
the old book-keeper holds with the preacher that all 
is vanity, but because he holds that the only really 
important thing is virtue, and that virtue bears 
imperial sway wherever its throne may be set up. 
This it is that gives to the book its perennial charm. 
Its charm as literature I think very great, — it 
grows with every reading. There is a wide range 
of delightful literary suggestion in the little volume. 
It teems with rich and varied allusion. One feels 
in reading it that he is in intimate intercourse with 
the best minds, and every literary association it 
awakens is touched with a new light. The fantas- 
tic characters that swarm unresting on the deck 
of the Flying Dutchman, beneath the spectral 
shrouds, and in the mystery of smoke and haze, 
have been called from pages known to all the world ; 
but whenever the reader again sees them they will 
be different, and more than they had been, for the 
illumination bestowed by the pen of Curtis. Nor 
has Curtis anywhere else, I think, sounded such 
solemn depths. There are suggestions of them in 
the Howadji books, but hardly more. The under- 
tone of " Titbottom's Spectacles " is of pure tragedy, 
and that of " A Cruise in the Flying Dutchman " 



102 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

is only less so. But nowhere is it more tlian an 
undertone, and the last page leaves us again under 
the glance of Prue's pure eyes, safe from the ques- 
tions that vex us with thoughts beyond the reaches 
of our souls. 

In "Prue and I" Curtis's style, though not yet 
fully developed, was determined, and nearly every 
quality to be found in " The Easy Chair," in the 
great orations, and even in the editorial writings 
of after years, is here. The style of the Howadji 
is far in the past. There is no more opera, no 
more array of conventions splendid but artificial, 
no longer the gay and haughty demand on the assent 
of the reader. There is instead the most engaging 
candor, and, amid a wealth of fancy and imagery 
and glowing sentiment, there is the essential sim- 
plicity of sincerity. The book from first to last 
breathes integrity. It amuses, it delights, it stirs 
the imagination, it thrills delicately the most sensi- 
tive chords, but above all it inspires affection and 
respect. The writer, though he should be forever 
unknown, is henceforth forever a friend, to be loved 
and alwavs to be trusted. 

In December, 1856, at the close of the year in 
which " Prue and I " was begun, Mr. Curtis became 
engaged to Miss Anna Shaw, daughter of Francis 
G. Shaw, of Staten Island. On Thanksgiving Day, 
1856, they were married. It was in every way a 
most happy union, and the marriage marked, if not 
a turning point, a distinct and important stage in 
the career of Mr. Curtis. Among the guests at 



THE POTJPHAR PAPERS; PRUE AND I. 103 

the quiet wedding was Major John C. Fremont. 
I shall have occasion later to refer to the part Mr. 
Curtis took in the great campaign in which the 
" Pathfinder " led the first gallant and splendid 
charge of the Republican party against slavery, 
and to the influence of Mr. Curtis's connection 
with the Shaw family in stimulating and sustain- 
ing, if not in arousing, his zeal in the cause of 
freedom. That influence — pure, strong, inspir- 
ing, and in the highest sense moral — was to con- 
tinue through life. I am sure that I violate no 
essential reserve in stating that, in the long and ar- 
duous years of Mr. Curtis's varied work, his home 
was always a haven where he constantly sought 
refuge and repose, and from which, refitted, re- 
inforced, inspired with renewed confidence and cour- 
age, he set out to the "good wars" that invited 
him, and that to the gracious and noble lady who 
made that home is due no small share in his many 
and rich achievements. 



CHAPTEE VIII. 

BUSINESS EXPERIENCES. 

The seven years following Mr. Curtis's return 
from Europe in 1860 were very busy, and generally 
very laborious, particularly after the establishment 
of " Putnam's Magazine." While still engaged on 
that, he had begun the series of weekly contribu- 
tions to " Harper's Weekly " by " The Lounger," to 
which I have already referred ; had written a num- 
ber of social essays for " Harper's Monthly ; " and 
j&nally, in 1854, had undertaken the sole charge of 
the " Easy-Chair." Meanwhile he kept up his lec- 
turing, with what energy the extracts from his let- 
ters already given show. For the most part he 
took his task lightly enough, and found "no end" 
of amusement, a^ well as much satisfaction, in his 
treatment by the local press of the cities he visited. 
He wrote January 15, 1853, to his father : — 

" A Utica paper makes a rather amusing notice 
of the lecture. It is to the effect that whoever has 
read Mr. C.'s books must have known what kind of 
a lecture to expect, — that it was full of gorgeous 
imagery, and that, although it had humor, beauty 
was its characteristic, but was full of sudden and 
quaint contrasts that presented an endless series of 



BUSINESS EXPERIENCES, 105 

grave and gay imagery. Yet an almost feminine 
perception of beauty, an unlimited command of 
language, an imagination chastened but rich, and 
evidently moulded by the most soothing influences 
of the Orient, resulted in a work which the hearer 
could not forget, — a series of pictures that would 
linger long in the memory of every one present. 
That is about the pith of it, which has the invalu- 
able merit of praising the lecture for just what it 
was not ! So, what with commendation for what 
it is and for what it is not, it will go hard with it 
if it does not secure all suffrages." 

The few letters to his father that have come into 
my hands are extremely interesting, and some of 
them very touching. There was a very sound and 
wholesome relation between father and son. The 
early essential independence of mind shown by the 
latter, always accompanied by and indeed resting 
on a strong affection and sincere respect, together 
with the gayety of many of the letters, show the 
intimacy that existed. Mr. Curtis was not yet 
thirty-two when his father died. Shortly after 
that loss he wrote to his mother (January 21, 
1856): — 

" You may imagine how sad and strange it is not 
to feel father's interest and anxiety in my success. 
I used to read everything that was said about me 
with his eyes, and so gladly sent him all the praise. 
But I do not feel at all removed from his real sym- 
pathy and interest even now. He is lost to the eye, 
but not at all, even as a father, to the heart. I 



106 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

shall always live as if in his eye. In every act I 
shall always feel his judgment. ... To children, 
parents are matters of course, like trees and stones. 
But when we become men and women, we reverence 
their individual excellence, and when we lose them 
we know that we have lost friends. How just and 
calm and generous a friend my father was to me ! 
He was so candid and simple in his love that I 
never ceased to feel myself a boy when I was 
with him." 

He was soon to gather some of that harvest of 
experience which tells us beyond all question that 
the springtime of life has passed forever. In the 
spring of 1856 he had put some money into the 
publishing firm of Dix, Edwards & Co., to whom 
had passed the ownership of '' Putnam's Monthly." 
They failed the next year in April, and in August 
Curtis, in a letter to Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, de- 
scribes his experience in business : " I was respon- 
sible as a general partner. To save the creditors 
(for I would willingly have called quits myself), I 
threw in more money, which was already forfeited, 
and undertook the business with Mr. Miller, the 
printer, who wanted to save himself. Presently 
Mr. Shaw put in some money as special partner. 
But what was confessed to be difficult, when we re- 
lied upon the statements given us, became impossi- 
ble when those statements turned against us, and 
last week we suspended. In the very moment of ar- 
rangement, it appeared that by an informality Mr. 
Shaw was held as a general partner : the creditors 



BUSINESS EXPERIENCES. ^ 107 

swarmed in to avail themselves of the slip, and we 
are now wallowing in the law. Of course I lose 
everything' and expected to, but there is now, in 
addition, this ugly chance of Mr. S.'s losing sixty 
or seventy thousand dollars, and all by an accident 
which the creditors fully comprehend." 

Without going into the details of the arrange- 
ment by which this trouble was finally settled, it is 
sufficient to say that Mr. Curtis assumed a large 
indebtedness for which he was not legally bound, 
and for nearly a score of years labored incessantly 
to pay it, devoting to that purpose the money 
earned by lecturing. It was an arduous task, in- 
volving not merely the work of preparation and 
the time spent in traveling, but much hardship 
and exposure, much sacrifice of the joys of a home 
peculiarly dear, and the almost complete abandon- 
ment of sustained scholarly pursuits to which he 
had looked with longing. It was not, however, 
without compensations, and some of high value. 
Of these, necessarily, the greatest was the one he 
rarely if ever mentioned, — the satisfaction of his 
conscience. Besides this, however, there was the 
close acquaintance he formed in every part of the 
Union with the many of those who were to march 
with him in the field of the better politics. When 
he took up the work of an editor a few years later, 
this acquaintance was continued and extended, and 
was of inestimable value to him and to the country. 
It gave him the sureness of aim which made his writ- 
ing more effective, perhaps, than that of any other 



108 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

man in his generation ; and it helped to give him 
also the sense of confidence in the final triumph of 
the causes in which he successively engaged, which 
was at once a source of strength to himself and an 
inspiration to others. This experience, moreover, 
was a constant training in the art of public speak- 
ing, of which he became easily, I think, the greatest 
master of his country in his time. But of these 
compensations there was, of course, no thought 
when Mr. Curtis calmly took up the heavy burden 
which he knew would not be discharged for many 
years, if ever. That was done in the quiet and un- 
questioning obedience to the law of simple, manly 
fidelity that was a law of his nature, and as inte- 
gral a part of it as his kindness of heart and gen- 
tleness of manners. So modestly was it done that 
I have almost a sense of offending his proud and 
delicate self-respect in thus speaking of it, as if it 
were a thing he could have helped doing. But we 
all know that it was a thing of a sort rarely done : 
any account of Mr. Curtis's life would be deficient 
were it omitted. 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE CAMPAIGN OF 1856. 

In 1846, ten years before the first candidate of 
the Republican party had been named, James Rus- 
sell Lowell had written, apropos of the movement 
for the annexation of Texas : — 

"Slavery, the Earth-born Cyclops, 

Fellest of the giant brood, 
Sons of brutish Force and Darkness 

That have drenched the Earth with blood, 
Famished in his self-made desert, 

Blinded by our purer day, 
Seeks in yet unblasted regions 

For his miserable prey. 
Shall we guide his gory fingers 

Where our helpless children play ? " 

For ten years devoted men and women, with 
the utmost energy and courage and persistence, if 
not always with discretion, had been pressing this 
question upon the American people. The people 
would hardly listen when only the almost unknown 
territory involved in the annexation of Texas and 
in the Mexican War was concerned, but when the 
slave power forced the same question upon their 
reluctant ears with reference to Kansas and Ne- 
braska, the land toward which the restless children 



110 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

of the free States had begun to push forward, there 
was no stilling it. And then it was that Mr. 
Curtis seems first earnestly to have considered it. 
He could not long have resisted it, we may be 
sure, but it is to be remarked that the connection 
he had formed with the Shaw family undoubtedly 
quickened his sympathies, and aroused him to a 
sense of what it was possible, and therefore impera- 
tive, for him to do. The father and mother of the 
woman who was to be his wife were of the early 
school of intensely earnest, unflinching, uncompro- 
mising, unwearying foes of slavery. It was a part 
of their religion to fight the evil at all times and in 
all ways that offered or could be found, and it is 
certain that, if the flame of his zeal was not kin- 
dled, it was nursed and fanned by theirs. 

As the extracts given from his letters to his 
father from Brook Farm and from Concord, and 
later after his return from Europe, clearly show, 
Mr. Curtis's mind was never closed to the essen- 
tial nature of slavery, never misled as to the spe- 
cious claims made for it founded on the Consti- 
tution, and especially never dull to the moral 
question involved. It was the latter that most 
deeply moved him, and aroused him to a series of 
appeals to young men of the Union which had 
a deep and lasting effect. In the spring of 1856 
had occurred the assault upon Charles Sumner in 
the Senate Chamber by Preston Brooks, of South 
Carolina. In that year also culminated the strug- 
gle in Kansas between the free-state immigrants 



THE CAMPAIGN OF 1856. Ill 

and settlers, largely from New England, and the 
pro-slavery men from the South, chiefly from Mis- 
souri, the latter aided by the force and author- 
ity of the Federal government under President 
Pierce. This is not the place to trace even in 
outline the features of the tremendous conflict of 
which these were incidents. It was in these that 
the tendencies of the slave power, which gave to 
the presidential canvass of that year its distinctive 
character, were most strikingly exposed. 

The first speech of importance by Mr. Curtis 
was delivered August 6, ISSG^ before the Liter- 
ary Societies of Wesleyan University, at Middle- 
town, Conn. Its title was, " The Duty of the 
American Scholar to Politics and the Times." 
He was twenty-eight years old. " Too young," he 
told the college boys, ^' to be your guide and phi- 
losopher, I am yet old enough to be your friend. 
Too little in advance of you in the great battle of 
life to teach you from experience, I am yet old 
enough to share with you the experience of other 
men and of history. I would gladly speak to 
you," he went on, " of the charms of pure scholar- 
ship ; of the dignity and worth of the scholar ; of 
the abstract relation of the scholar to the state. 
The sweet air we breathe and the repose of mid- 
summer invite a calm ethical or intellectual dis- 
course. But would you have counted him a friend 
of Greece, who quietly discussed the abstract 
nature of patriotism on that Greek summer day 
through whose hopeless and immortal hours Leon- 



112 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

idas and his three hundred stood at Thermopylae 
for liberty ? And to-day, as the scholar meditates 
that deed, the air that steals in at his window 
darkens his study and suffocates him as he reads. 
Drifting across a continent, and blighting the har- 
vests that gild it with plenty from the Atlantic to 
the Mississippi, a black cloud obscures the page 
that records an old crime, and compels him to 
know that freedom always has its Thermopylae, 
and that his Thermopylae is called Kansas." 

Of Sumner he said : " In a republic of freemen 
this scholar speaks for freedom, and his blood 
stains the Senate floor. There it will blush 
through all our history. That damned spot will 
never out from memory, from tradition, or from 
noble hearts." * 

Of the function of the scholar class : — 
" The very material success for which nations, 
like individuals, strive, is full of the gravest dan- 
ger to the best life of the state as of the individ- 
ual. But as in human nature itself are found the 
qualities which best resist the proclivities of an in- 
dividual to meanness and moral cowardice, — as 
each man has a conscience, a moral mentor which 
assures him what is truly best for him to do, — so 
has every state a class which by its very charac- 
ter is dedicated to eternal and not to temporary 
interests ; whose members are priests of the mind, 
not of the body ; and who are necessarily the con- 
servative body of intellectual and moral freedom. 
This is the class of scholars. The elevation and 



THE CAMPAIGN OF 1856. 113 

correction of public sentiment is the scholar's 
office in the state. 

" If, then, such be the scholar and the scholar's 
office, — if he be truly the conscience of the state, 
— the fundamental law of his life is liberty. At 
every cost, the true scholar asserts, defends, lib- 
erty of thought and liberty of speech. Of what 
use to a man is a thought that will help the world, 
if he cannot tell it to the world ? Such a thought 
comes to him as Jupiter came to Semele. He is 
consumed by the splendor that secretly possesses 
him. The Inquisition condemns Galileo's creed: 
' Pur muove ' — still it moves — replies Galileo 
in his dungeon. Tyranny poisons the cup of Soc- 
rates: he smilingly drains it to the health of the 
world. The church, towering vast in the midst 
of universal superstition, lays its withering finger 
upon the freedom of the human mind, and its own 
child, leaping from its bosom, denounces to the 
world his mother's madness." 

After tracing the character of Milton as most 
nearly fulfilling the conditions of the ideal scholar, 
Mr. Curtis made a concise but careful and strong 
statement of the advance of the slave power, from 
the framing of the Constitution to the passage of 
the Kansas-Nebraska Bill. He drew a pathetic 
and impressive picture of the men of Connecticut 
who answered the call to Lexington and Boston. 

" Through these very streets they marched who 
never returned. They fell and were buried, but 
they can never die. Not sweeter are the flowers 



114 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

that make your valley fair, not greener are the 
pines that give your valley its name, than the 
memory of the brave men who died for freedom. 
And yet no victim of those days, sleeping under 
the green sod of Connecticut, is more truly a 
martyr of Liberty than every murdered man 
whose bones lie bleaching in this summer sun 
upon the silent plains of Kansas. And so long 
as Liberty has one martyr, so long as one drop 
of blood is poured out for her, so long from tliat 
single drop of bloody sweat of the agony of hu- 
manity shall spring hosts as countless as the forest 
leaves and mighty as the sea. 

" Brothers ! the call has come to us," he con- 
cluded ; " I bring it to you in these calm retreats. 
I summon you to the great fight of Freedom. I 
call upon you to say with your voices whenever the 
occasion offers, and with your votes when the day 
comes, that upon the fertile fields of Kansas, in 
the very heart of the continent, the Upas-tree of 
slavery, dripping death-dews upon national pros- 
perity and upon free labor, shall never be planted. 
I call upon you to plant there the palm of peace, 
the vine and olive of a Christian civilization. I 
call upon you to determine whether this great 
experiment of human freedom, which has been the 
scorn of despotism, shall by its failure be also our 
sin and shame. I call upon you to defend the 
hope of the world. The voice of our brothers who 
are bleeding, no less than of our fathers who bled, 
summons us to this battle. Shall the children of 



THE CAMPAIGN OF 1856. 115 

unborn generations clustering over that vast West- 
ern Empire rise up and call us blessed or cursed ? 
Here are our Marathon and Lexington. Here are 
our heroic fields. The hearts of good men beat 
with us. The fight is fierce ; the issue is with 
God, but God is good." 

In this, the first serious address on public affairs 
that Curtis made, there are indications of some of 
the most distinctive and the finest traits of his ora- 
tory at its best. The happy expression of the in- 
fluence of the season and the place with which he 
frequently began, the vivid and inspiring use of 
historic associations fitted with aptness to the pur- 
pose of the discourse, very jewels upon its thread, 
but beaming a steady light upon its object; the 
stately march of broad recital ; the solemn and 
simple, tender and stirring appeal ; and through 
all the sense of the high level of principle and con- 
viction from which the speaker surveyed the field 
of fact and argument, — all these are here. There 
are points in the discourse where the fine restraint 
of the rhetoric which was the characteristic of his 
riper years was not attained, and there are signs 
that his subject had not been so severely studied, 
its details not so closely subordinated and mar- 
shaled, as was his later habit. The logic does not 
fail, but it is not so sustained, and the view of the 
hostile critic had not been so clearly imagined as 
became his wont. Experience and observation had 
not done their whole work at twenty-eight, but 
they had begun it, and were well advanced. With 



116 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

this speech the party of resistance to the extension 
of slavery, the party of freedom, knew that a cham- 
pion had taken up its cause, who brought to it not 
only the dashing courage of the cavalier, but the 
unyielding firmness of the Puritan ; a bright and 
tempered sword flashed upon the combat in the 
hand of one who could not turn back if he would, 
so high he felt to be the behest that summoned 
him. "The fight is fierce," he cried; "the issue is 
with God, but God is good." 

In the autumn Curtis was fairly enlisted in 
the "campaign." He made an extended tour of 
Pennsylvania for the state election, which was then 
held in October, and which made the State one of 
the most hotly contested in every presidential year. 
Returning, he spoke frequently in Connecticut and 
New York. Mr. Rhodes, in his recently published 
history, says : " N. P. Willis, one of the best known 
litterateurs of his day, relates how he drove five 
miles one night to hear Curtis deliver a stump 
speech. He at first thought the author of the 
Howadji 'too handsome and well dressed' for a 
political orator, but as he listened his mistake was 
apparent. He heard a logical and rational address, 
and now and then the speaker burst into the full 
tide of eloquence unrestrained. Willis declared 
that, though fifty-four years old, he should this 
year cast his 'virgin vote,' and it would be for 
Fremont." 

Writing October 31, on the eve of the election, 
Curtis said to a near friend : " I shall not tell you 



THE CAMPAIGN OF 1856, 117 

of the great struggle which is advancing. The 
election is but an event. God is still God, how- 
ever the election goes and whoever is elected. 
The movement which is now fairly begun will not 
relapse into apathy or death." 



CHAPTER X. 

A NOVEL AND A LECTURE. 

Mr. Curtis, as I have said, was married in No- 
vember, 1856, and went to live on Staten Island, 
where his wife's father had a spacious home with 
large grounds. His first child, a son, was born 
there in December, 1857. His home life, though 
constantly broken in upon by his lecturing tours 
and by his journeyings for the delivery of political 
speeches, was always happy, peaceful, the source of 
incalculable comfort and delight. The following 
extracts from letters to his intimate friend, Charles 
Eliot Norton, of Cambridge, will give the reader a 
glance at his life during the few years preceding 
the great campaign of 1860 and the Civil War : — 

New York, June 17, '58. 

Your kind note floats into my hand just as I 
am " stepping westward," for a fortnight. I go to 
the University of Michigan and Antioch College 
with an oration upon " The Democratic Principle, 
and its Prospects in our Country," with every word 
of which I think you would agree, and not find a 
single thing which you would be sorry to have a 
friend of yours say. When I come to you I will 



A NOVEL AND A LECTURE, 119 

bring it, and take the taste of some other things of 
mine out of your mouth. 

North Shore, September 25, '58. 

I have promised to deliver my " Democracy and 
Education " before a teachers' institute in Newport 
on the 8th October, and I shall put ojff coming to 
you till then. 

" For tho' on pleasure he was bent, 
He had a frugal mind." 

What else could you expect of a seditious Sepoy, — • 
a Chairman of the Republican County Committee, 
an agricultural orator, and your most affectionate 

G. W. C. 

On his return from this trip he describes his 

home-coming : — 

10th October, '58. 

I saw the receding tower of Trinity, and pres- 
ently beheld the camp of the army of occupation 
upon the wharf — who but she ? — and along the 
Kills we drove, while I talked of Newport friends 
and fields, and watched the autumn waiting for me 
in the woods and on the flowery hills. All were 
well. The boy of boys — the man-child — shouted 
and jumped into my arms, and in an hour he was 
riding behind his goat with his mamma and papa 

in waiting." 

8th November, '58. 

We have finished our fight and elected our 
governor. He is a merchant, an average merchant. 



120 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

but our congressional majority, which shows by dis- 
tricts the complexion of the State, is nearly seventy 
thousand. That shows a change of heart. 

And yet, while we have won, the one thing clear 
seems to be that Douglas is the next President, 
unless the Slave party offers us some new issue. 
We cannot beat them upon that of Popular Sover- 
eignty, upon which D. will make his stand and his 
battle. 

Next week I begin my lecturing, and have al- 
ready engaged sixty evenings. 

January 30, '59. 

At the Burns festival in Troy I led off Auld 
Lang Syne at four in the morning and hoarsened 
my voice. 

Marcli 2, '59. 

I am glad you succeeded in amusing your little 
sister. I have often wished she were here to join 
Master Frank's class in Little Bo-Peep. Don't 
stimulate her mind with too much House-that-Jack- 
Built at once, but lead her gradually on from Cock 
Eobin to Mother Hubbard. 

In September, 1859, he writes : — 

" The ' Weekly ' now circulates 93,000, and is very 
thoroughly read. I make my Lounger a sort of lay 
pulpit, and the readers have a chance of hearing 
things suggested that otherwise there would be no 
hint of in the paper. And, after all, an author has 
something besides his own fame to look after." 

It was in this year that Mr. Curtis, tempted, I 



A NOVEL AND A LECTURE, 121 

imagine, by what the publishers could offer not 
only in money, but in the security of a very wide 
circle of readers, began the novel of " Trumps " as 
a serial in '' Harper's Weekly." It was not an un- 
natural venture. He was a lover of good fiction, 
and an intelligent critic of it. He was in the very 
prime of his manhood. He had won notable suc- 
cess in varied directions. He had seen much of 
the world, not only of society, but of affairs and 
of politics. He had traveled widely abroad and 
in his own land. He was a welcome intimate in 
the houses of gifted men and women. He was 
conscious of the possession of the literary faculty. 
Expression fitting the thought was not difficult to 
him. He had quick and sensitive sympathies, a 
sound and trustworthy judgment, and his fellow- 
beings, of all sorts and on all levels, interested him 
much. He could not but know that when he talked 
of them, of their character, their doings, their oddi- 
ties, adventures, aims, humors, his talk charmed 
his hearers. Why should he not write a novel? 
Why should he not group in a well-connected story 
the acts and words that should reveal men and 
women as he saw and knew them, not forgetting 
the lesson of the supreme value of goodness which 
every life, good or evil, disclosed to him, and of 
which his own was a half -unconscious reading? 
Why cannot the eagle swim ? 

I think it is not to be denied that " Trumps" is 
depressing reading, despite its many excellences. 
It is the fruit of an author's mistake as to his 



122 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

powers. It is Thackeray's pictures, George Eliot's 
poetry, Dickens's portrayal of aristocracy. It shows 
how many and how great gifts the author had, and 
how little he had of the rare art of sustained story- 
telling. Five years before, Lowell had written 
to Briggs (he had just said of the " Chateaux in 
Spain," " I think it one of the best essays I ever 
read, I don't care by what author ") : " The fault 
of ' The Potiphar Papers' seems to me that in them 
there are dialogizing and monologizing thoughts, 
but not flesh and blood enough." And it is with 
"dialogizing and monologizing thoughts" that the 
pages of "Trumps" fairly swarm. The title, the 
intention of which is emphasized in the last sen- 
tence, shows that the real purpose of the writer 
was not to write a novel, but to point a moral. 
" Patient and gentle reader," he says, as he closes 
his work, " it is for you to say who, among all the 
players we have been watching, held Trumps," and 
the reader is expected to answer that Trumps were 
held by the benevolent and beneficent Lawrence 
Newt, and by that heaven-born vision of earthly 
beauty and unspotted soul, Hope Wayne, and, as 
the proportions of the pack allow, by the lesser 
embodiments of kindness and purity and rectitude, 
and that all the low cards fell to those who were 
playing for self. It is a gracious view of life, and 
one that cheers the good in adverse conditions, 
even if it escapes the attention and leaves uncor- 
rected the wayward will of the mean and wicked. 
But this naive indiscretion as to the title of the 



A NOVEL AND A LECTURE. 123 

book seems to me to show the peculiar failure of 
the writer to grasp the cardinal principle of his 
art, that the moral, if moral there must be, should 
point itself. And, worse than this, the title does 
not fit the avowed purpose. Trumps are the gift 
of the gods. It is the duty of a skillful player not 
to waste them on his partner's trick, and to make 
and take all the chances of the game in order to get 
the most good of them, and it is the duty of an 
honest player not to supply them when wanting 
from up his sleeve. But to find them in his hand 
when the deal is made is no merit of his, and to 
miss them is not his fault. Now the lesson of 
Curtis's novel is clearly that the reward of virtue 
is in great part earned, and not a matter of chance. 
The joy of honorable self-denial, the peace that 
comes from generous sympathy with the good for- 
tune of others, through one's own loss, — these are 
urged, and with winning earnestness. They are 
not the fruit of chance. Indeed, the life that Cur- 
tis tries to depict and does very clearly suggest, 
and of which he gives us most engaging chapters, 
is not in reality a game at all, neither a game of 
hazard nor of sport. Nor, on the other hand, — 
that is the shortcoming of the writer, — is it a 
drama. It is a modern version of the mediaeval 
"morality," — a long and elaborate lesson, without, 
indeed, the tediousness of its ancient prototype, 
and also without the picturesqueness gained by 
that from the very concrete notions of the Devil and 
his conqueror then prevailing. I may say, I hope 



124 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

without offense, that it is in its general effect a 
Sunday - school story, written by a man of rare 
gifts, some of which betray the elusive charm of 
genius, but still essentially of that class, producing, 
and apparently intended to produce, the impression 
that in the end virtue triumphs and vice comes to a 
miserable end. 

Yet there are the materials, the raw materials, of 
a strong story in "Trumps," and the writer's con- 
ception of their significance is vigorous. The bril- 
liant viciousness of Abel Newt, started at school 
and developed in society, in dissipation, in politics, 
in the corruption of the capital, in the desperation 
of the culminating crime ; the wasted and misdi- 
rected loves of the two sisters whose lives are shad- 
owed and nearly wrecked by one man ; the un- 
disclosed experiences by which the character of 
Lawrence Newt is moulded ; contrasted with these, 
the simple and sunny life of Amy Waring, the more 
delicate and remote nature of Hope Wayne, the 
hopeless final kindling of real affection in the heart 
of Abel's mistress, — here is the stuff of which ro- 
mance and tragedy are woven, and with it are plen- 
tiful minor threads of comedy and sentiment. Nor 
can I resist the impression that, had Curtis taken 
up the study and practice of the story-telling art 
earlier, or with a firmer purpose, the product would 
have been, if not perfect, not only far more satis- 
factory than this single fruit, but of a marked dis- 
tinction and value. There are few more real fig- 
ures than " Prue "and her husband, and Titbottom 



A NOVEL AND A LECTURE. 125 

is only slightly less real. But I cannot regret that 
his energies, great and efficient as they were ('' his 
mind works so easily," wrote Lowell), were not 
turned in this direction. He might possibly have 
won a more lasting fame, and perhaps a wider one. 
I cannot think he would have done wider or more 
lasting service. He could not seriously have 
changed his aim. He might have attained the art 
that makes the moral point itself ; he could never 
have really forgotten or wished to forget the moral. 
The highest achievement, I take it, in fiction, cer- 
tainly in the more modern fiction, is the impressive 
unfolding of the complexity, the contradiction, the 
pathetic or amusing or baffling conflict, in human 
nature. Perhaps Curtis saw these. I doubt if he 
felt them with the intensity and depth that are req- 
uisite to embody them. Life does not seem to me 
to have been to him a supremely complex problem, 
but rather, simple with the simplicity of his own 
rare and beautiful nature. It is delicate ground to 
traverse, but I think that, as his own conscience 
was in no wise a Delphic oracle, but spoke to him 
with the directness of Sinai, — " thou shalt " or 
" thou shalt not " — he may easily not have under- 
stood the infinite difficulties that men less morally 
gifted meet and so seldom conquer, not always be- 
cause they will not do what is right, but because 
they cannot decide. And again, as conscience hav- 
ing once answered his questioning, his obedience, 
if not easy, was singularly certain and prompt and 
steadfast, he may not quite have been able to see 



126 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

or to portray those impulses of evil before which a 
fine nature becomes the helpless victim of passion, 
the clearest aspiration toward the best vanishes, 
and the soul lies weak, weary, defeated in the tan- 
gled meshes of a life it loathes. He might have 
trained himseK to imagine, but I believe it would 
not have been easy for him, the multiform effects 
of circumstance, of heredity, of all that sways the 
will, which are so important and so fascinating a 
part of the creations of such writers as George 
Eliot, and, with less betrayal of conscious philoso- 
phy, of such a writer as Thackeray. And since, if 
he had worked through fiction, his aim must still 
have been what it practically was in everything he 
wrote after the Howadji books, it is surely best 
that he pursued it in his own way. This, I be- 
lieve, he felt strongly himself. He did not regard 
" Trumps " with any great satisfaction, and he 
never renewed an attempt which, relatively at least 
to others of his own, was a failure. 

Mr. Curtis's lectures were generally received with 
great admiration, and his welcome was almost always 
cordial, even though he went, as he did frequently 
after 1856, with an incendiary address in his bag. 
But there were experiences of a different sort. 

In the summer of 1859 Mr. Curtis accepted a 
proposition to deliver a lecture in Philadelphia on 
the 15th of December. It came from two young 
men who had planned the course purely as a busi- 
ness enterprise ; and though Mr. Curtis chose as his 
subject " The Present Aspect of the Slavery Ques- 



A NOVEL AND A LECTURE. 127 

tion," it was a mere coincidence that the Anti-Sla- 
very Society of Pennsylvania was to hold a fair at 
the same time. In October came the raid of John 
Brown upon Harper's Ferry, and on the 20th of 
December Brown was hanged. The excitement 
roused by these events over all the country ran very 
high in Philadelphia, much of the richest trade of 
that city being with the South. On the day before 
the lecture was to be given, handbills summoned a 
mass meeting at National Hall, where Curtis was 
to speak, with the avowed purpose of preventing 
him from speaking. This hall was in the upper 
part of a building the lower part of which was used 
as a warehouse, into w^hich railroad cars were run 
to be unloaded. Mayor Henry, though not in fa- 
vor of the views Mr. Curtis was known to hold, did 
not oppose the delivery of the lecture ; and Mr. 
Euggles, the chief of police, though a firm Demo- 
crat in politics, declared that free speech must be 
defended at any cost. Mr. Curtis went to the hall 
accompanied by Dr. Furness and Mrs. Furness, by 
Lucretia Mott, and the Hon. William D. Kelley, 
who introduced him. Approach to the stage was 
had from the floor by a narrow, winding stairway on 
either side, which also descended to the warehouse 
below. These were blocked, so soon as Mr. Curtis 
and his party reached the stage, by benches thrown 
one on another, and by a couple of members of 
the junior Anti-Slavery Society armed with heavy 
sticks. In the hall a policeman was stationed at 
the end of each seat, and several hundred below 



128 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

guarded the entrances and the warehouse. Mr. 
Kelley was allowed to introduce the lecturer, but 
the latter had hardly risen when rioting began. 
Repeated attempts were made to storm the stage, 
but were repulsed. Stones were thrown through 
the windows, and bottles of vitriol, and one of the 
auditors was terribly burned. Meanwhile there 
was in the warehouse below a series of determined 
and furious attempts by the mob to get to the hall 
from that point. The police repelled them, making 
many arrests. At first Chief Buggies sent the 
prisoners to the police station ; but soon seeing that 
this weakened his force too much, he had offenders 
locked in empty cars standing on the tracks in the 
warehouse. Two attempts were made to set fire to 
the building. Then Chief Euggles mounted a car 
and announced that if this were again tried every 
effort would be made to save the persons in the 
hall, but that the prison-cars and their human freight 
would be left to the flames. The attempt was not 
renewed. 

Mr. Henry C. Davis, of New York, then a resi- 
dent of Philadelphia, a grandson of Lucretia Mott 
and one of the young guards on the stage, from 
whom the above recounted facts are obtained, says 
that " there were only brief intervals in which Mr. 
Curtis could be heard, but that he delivered his ad- 
dress in full." " When I could hear him," says Mr. 
Davis, " his voice was firm and clear and resonant, 
and his delivery sustained and self-possessed." " It 
was," says Mr. Isaac H. Clothier, who was Mr. 



A NOVEL AND A LECTURE. 129 

Davis's companion, ''an eventful and dangerous 
evening, but the meeting did not break up until the 
lecture was fully delivered, and until free speech 
had been triumphantly vindicated in Philadelphia. 
Mr. Curtis, with all his well-known gentleness and 
sweetness of spirit, proved himself on that occasion 
to be a man of mettle and undaunted courage." 



CHAPTEE XI. 

THE EVE OF THE WAR. 

Once entered on politics, Mr. Curtis gave to it 
most careful study as well as much hard and de- 
tailed work. He was very active in the Republican 
party organization in the county of Richmond, 
N. Y., formed by Staten Island, and was early 
chosen chairman of the County Republican Com- 
mittee, a post he held, with the greatest assiduity 
in its duties, almost uninterruptedly for many 
years. Evidence of the clear fashion in which he 
reasoned on the practical as well as the theoretic 
side of politics is found in a letter to Mr. John J. 
Pinkerton, of West Chester, Pennsylvania, then a 
young man, who had made Mr. Curtis's acquain- 
tance at Union College, on the delivery of the ad- 
dress on " Patriotism " in 1867. This acquaintance 
ripened into a warm friendship which lasted un- 
shaken to the time of Mr. Curtis's death. The 
letter followed an answer to Mr. Curtis's inquiry 
as to the state of opinion in Pennsylvania with ref- 
erence to the approaching presidential contest. 

North Shore, 13th April, 1860. 
My dear Pinkeeton, — Thanks for your kind 
response. I have had the same suspicion of Penn- 



THE EVE OF THE WAR. 131 

sylvanla, but my general feeling is this : that the 
nomination of Mr. Bates would so chill and para- 
lyze the youth and ardor which are the strength 
of the Republican party ; would so cheer the Demo- 
crats as a merely available move, showing distrust 
of our own position and power ; would so alienate 
the German Northwest, and so endanger a bolt 
from the straight Republicans of New England, — 
that the possible gain of Pennsylvania and New Jer- 
sey, and even Indiana, might be balanced. Add to 
this that defeat with Bates is the utter destruction 
of our party organization, and that success with 
him is very doubtful victory, and I cannot but feel 
that upon the whole his nomination is an act of 
very uncertain wisdom. 

It is very true that there is no old Republican, 
because the party is young, and it will not do to 
ask too sharply when a man became a Republican. 
Moreover, a man like Mr. Bates may very properly 
have been a Fillmore man in '56, because he might 
not have believed that the Slavery party was as 
resolved and desperate as it immediately showed 
itself in the Dred Scott business ; this is all true, 
but human nature cries out against the friends of 
Fremont in '56 working for a Fillmore man in '60, 
and there is a good deal of human nature in the 
public. The nomination of Mr. Bates will plunge 
the really Republican States into a syncope. If 
they are strong enough to remain Republican while 
they are apathetic, then in the border States you 
may decide the battle. 



132 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

I think New York is very sure for the Chicago 
man, whoever he is ; but if Bates is the man, we 
shall have to travel upon our muscle ! ! 

Individually believing, as I do, in the necessary 
triumph of our cause by causes superior to the 
merely political, I should prefer a fair fight upon 
the merits of the case between Douglas and Seward, 
or Hunter or Guthrie and Seward, I think Doug- 
las will be the Charleston man. 

Thank you once more. 

Yours faithfully, 

George William Curtis. 

Mr. Curtis went as a delegate to the Republican 
National Convention at Chicago in May, 1860. It 
was his first experience in those vast representative 
assemblies so peculiar to American political life, 
and yet so firmly established in it that it is not 
easy for an American to realize that they are 
without a counterpart in any other nation. It 
was a field calculated to bring out the political 
capacity of any man of ability entering it with a 
definite purpose and willing to face its difficulties. 
In theory the convention is absolutely free. It is a 
gathering of delegates chosen in congressional dis- 
tricts to discuss and announce the policy and name 
the candidates of their party. In practice very im- 
portant limitations have grown up. Some of these 
are almost purely physical, and spring from the 
nature of the organization necessary to the perform- 
ance of complex functions by a body of numerous 



THE EVE OF THE WAR. 133 

members. Others, however, have their source In 
the inevitable desire of men intrusted with repre- 
sentative power to use it to advance their own views 
or their own interests. Though the Republican 
party was then young and its spirit was more free, 
unselfish, and more nearly purely moral than that 
of any other great party that had preceded it in 
our history, it was not without leaders actuated by 
ambition, by appetite, and by jealousy. Mr. Sew- 
ard, then United States Senator from New York, 
was the "logical candidate "of the party for the 
Presidency. His eminent ability, his long and 
honorable service in the Senate, his breadth of view, 
his courageous and enlightened advocacy of the es- 
sential principles of his party, his political sagacity, 
were claims that could not be ignored. Mr. Wil- 
liam M. Evarts was the chairman of the New 
York delegation, and presented Mr. Seward's name 
to the convention in a speech of great force and 
noble enthusiasm. Mr. Curtis, as the letter just 
cited shows, believed the nomination of Mr. Seward 
to be both just and wise. But he was to distin- 
guish himself in the convention by a most bril- 
liant and unexpected assault on the lines of Mr. 
Seward's supporters. These were led by Mr. 
Thurlow Weed, of New York, a politician whose 
rare qualities as a manager rested largely on his 
instinctive and acquired knowledge of the weak- 
nesses of his fellow-men, of their prejudices and 
personal desires, and who was not fond of leaving 
much to the unguided impulses of a convention. 



134 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

It had been determined tliat tlie declaration 
of principles — the platform — of the convention 
should be so shaped that the more timid and less 
convinced of the opponents of the rival party 
should not be scared from its acceptance by too 
radical utterances. Among the more advanced of 
the Republican leaders at Chicago was Mr. Joshua 
E. Giddings, of Ohio, who hoped to make of the 
party an instrument not only for checking the ex- 
tension of slavery, but for its ultimate extinction. 
To serve this purpose, he proposed to add to the 
platform the words of the preamble of the Declar- 
ation of Independence : " That the maintenance of 
the principle promulgated in the Declaration of 
Independence and embodied in the Federal Con- 
stitution, ' that all men are created equal ; that they 
are endowed by their Creator with certain inalien- 
able rights ; that among these are life, liberty, and 
the pursuit of happiness ; that, to secure these 
rights, governments are instituted among men, de- 
riving their just powers from the consent of the 
governed,' is essential to the preservation of our 
republican institutions." The amendment was re- 
jected, and Mr. Giddings in despair turned to 
leave the hall. "It seemed to me," Mr. Curtis 
afterwards said, "that the spirits of all the mar- 
tyrs to freedom were marching out of the conven- 
tion behind the venerable form of that indignant 
and outraged old man." He rose to renew the mo- 
tion of Mr. Giddings. A writer in the " Boston 
Herald " of January 10, 1880, gives the best ac- 



THE EVE OF THE WAR. 135 

count of the scene that followed that I have been 
able to find. Mr. Curtis's voice was at first drowned 
in the clamor of the followers of the managers : — 

" Folding his arms, he calmly faced the uproari- 
ous mass and waited. The spectacle of a man who 
would n't be put down at length so far amused the 
delegates that they stopped to look at him. ' Gen- 
tlemen,' rang out that musical voice in tones of 
calm intensitv, ' this is the convention of free 
speech, and I have been given the floor. I have 
only a few words to say to you, but I shall say 
them if I stand here until to-morrow morning.' 
Again the tumult threatened the roof of the Wig- 
wam, and again the speaker waited. His pluck 
and the chairman's gavel soon gave him another 
chance. Skillfully changing the amendment to 
the second resolution, to make it in order, he spoke 
as with a tongue of fire in its support, daring the 
representatives of the party of freedom, meeting on 
the borders of the free prairies in a hall dedicated 
to the advancement of liberty, to reject the doc- 
trine of the Declaration of Independence affirming 
the equality and defining the rights of man. The 
speech fell like a spark upon tinder, and the amend- 
ment was adopted with a shout of enthusiasm more 
unanimous and deafening than the yell with which 
it had been previously rejected." 

The following extracts from letters to his friend, 
Mr. Norton, indicate Curtis's occupation and the 
tenor of his thoughts during the remainder of the 
year 1860, marked by the triumph of the contest 



136 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

against slavery In the political field. In response 
to a request to address a meeting in behaK of the 
Italian cause he wrote : — 

June 12, 1860. 

Your note reached me at sunset this evening as 
I stood upon the lawn, in the midst of green trees, 
blooming flowers, and the fairest fair. It was the 
moment to be asked to speak for Italy, but — I 
must stay at home. I have made several engage- 
ments, near at hand, to say something for Abra- 
ham. I have also promised to deliver a Fourth of 
July oration upon the Island. I am putting my 
hand of " Trumps " into order for the printer. I 
have my little jobs at Franklin Square, and I have 
been away so much, and my home, my wife, and my 
boy are so dear and lovely ! You will not think 
that I love Italy and you less if I cannot say yes 
to you just now. How grandly Garibaldi stalks 
through that magnificent, moribund Italy, each 
step giving her life and hope ! When I speak of 
liberty on the Fourth, I shall not forget the soap- 
boiler of Staten Island ! 

Under the elms and the sassafras, and among the 
thick flowering shrubs, I think of you girdled with 
your sapphire sea ! Then Nanny and I jump on 
the horses, and gallop through the woods until we 
can see it, too, I wish you could come and see us 
here. If you want to run off and be entirely alone, 
won't you let me know ? Have you seen how uni- 
versally your book is commended ? I have. 



THE EVE OF THE WAR. 137 

3d August, 1860. 

Have you read Olmsted's new book ? It is the 
third of the series, and completes his view of the 
slave States. It is a curious confirmation of Sum- 
ner's "Barbarism," and seems to me about the 
heaviest blow (being true and moderate) that has 
yet been dealt at the system. It shows conclusively 
what a blight it is, but at the same time how diffi- 
cult and distant the remedy seems to be. It is the 
most timely of books, for no man who believes 
that the picture is faithful would be in any manner 
accessory to planting such a curse in the territo- 
ries. 

How bravely the battle goes on ! I am speak- 
ing a good deal here upon the Island and in our 
[first] district, and, although I shall never again 
have the sanguine hope of my first campaign, yet 
I can see how every sign promises. 

I find myself looking over the sea sometimes 
and thinking of Italy, but I know that it is not 
Italy I look at, but the old days in Italy. 

North Shore, 14th October, 1860. 
My dear Charles, — I have been scribbling 
and scrabbling at such a rate that I have recently 
cut all my friends for my country. We are having 
a glorious fight. This State, I think, will astonish 
itself and the country by its majority. The signifi- 
cance of the result in Pennsylvania is, that the 
conscience and common sense of the country are 
fully aroused. The apostle of disunion spoke here 



138 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

last week, and, if there had been any doubt of New 
York before, there could have been none after he 
spake. Even Fletcher Harper, after hearing it, 
said to me, " I shall have hard work not to vote 
for Lincoln." 

I have been at work in my own county and dis- 
trict, and the other day I went to the convention to 
make sure that I was not nominated for Congress ! 

I have been writing a new lecture, " The Policy 
of Honesty," and am going as far as Milwaukee in 
November. Here 's a lot about myself, but we 
country philosophers grow dreadfully egotistical. 
I did cherish a sweet hope (it was like trying to 
raise figs in our open January !) that I should slip 
over and see you, and displace my photograph for 
a day or two, but I can only send the same old love 
as new as ever. The ball for little Renfrew ^ was 
a failure, though I was one of the 400, — and his 
reception was the most imposing pageant, from the 
mass of human beings, that I ever saw. 

19th December, '60. 

No, I did not speak in Philadelphia, because the 
mayor thought he could not keep [the peace] , and 
feared a desperate personal attack upon me. The 
invitation has been renewed, but I have declined 
it, and have recalled another acceptance to speak 
there. It would be foolhardy just now. I am very 
sorry for the Mayor. 

There must be necessarily trouble of some kind 

The Prince of Wales. 



THE EVE OF THE WAR. 139 

from tills Southern movement. But I think the 
North will stand firmly and kindly to its position. 
If the point shall be persistently made by the 
South, as it has been made so far, the nationaliza- 
tion of slavery or disunion, the North will say, and 
I think calmly. Disunion, and God for the right. 
The Southerners are lunatics, but what can we do ? 
We cannot let them do as they will, for then we 
should all perish together. 

The political fight was over. The party of 
slavery limitation — it would not be exact to call it 
even the anti-slavery party — had elected its Pres- 
ident, and held a safe majority in the House of 
Eepresentatives. The men who had brought the 
fight thus far were called to face a wholly new sit- 
uation, one that they had not clearly foreseen, and 
had not consciously produced, and yet one which 
was inevitable. It is true that both Mr. Lincoln 
and his chief rival for the Republican nomina- 
tion, Mr. Seward, had declared in general terms 
the irrepressible, irreconcilable conflict between sla- 
very and freedom ; but there is little probability 
and less evidence that they had formed a distinct 
idea of what the direction or force of such a con- 
flict would be, or how they should meet it if the 
people gave them the power and imposed the duty 
of meeting it. Moreover, the victory they had won 
was not so complete as to force the problem upon 
them, or even to enable them to take up its solu- 
tion in the ordinary progress of public affairs. 



140 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

The Democratic party still held the Senate and 
the Supreme Court. No affirmative legislation was 
possible. The Republicans had elected their Presi- 
dent through the division of their opponents, and 
had cast less than two fifths of the popular vote. 
Their leaders, therefore, were not to be blamed 
that they had no plan, nor any very clear principle 
on which to frame one, for the complete conduct of 
the government. The threats of secession, which 
had multiplied and become constantly fiercer dur- 
ing the presidential canvass, were not taken to be 
so serious as they proved to be, and were perhaps 
not intended to be carried so far as afterwards they 
were carried. The few words last quoted from 
Mr. Curtis expressed a feeling very general at the 
time they were uttered and for some months later. 
When South Carolina passed its ordinance of se- 
cession, and one after another of the Southern 
States followed her example, the Federal govern- 
ment was still under the guidance of Mr. Buchanan, 
who, whatever his motives, — and they are not now 
judged with such severity or such certainty as they 
once were, — took no decisive step. The public 
mind was startled, puzzled, and could not know its 
own real purpose. The first impulse — and it was 
a sound one — was toward the avoidance of civil 
war. Rather than tJiat^ " Disunion, and God for 
the right." 

Early in January came Mr. Seward's famous 
speech in the Senate, — a speech intended to bring 
the minds of men together, but which appealed 



THE EVE OF THE WAR. 141 

only to the calm judgment when calm judgment 
had already become almost impossible. Mr. Cur- 
tis received it with eagerness. '^ I hope," he wrote 
to Mr. Norton on the 16th of January from Rox- 
bury, Mass., — "I hope you like Seward's speech 
as I do. I see by the New York papers that 
people are beginning to see how great a speech 
it is. Webster had his 7th of March and went 
wrong; Seward his, and went right. If you don't 
agree, load your guns, for mine are charged to the 
muzzle." Nearly a month later he wrote to his 
friend Mr. Pinkerton more fully : — 

North Shore, 11th February, 1861. 

My dear Pinkerton, — Your letter of the 
18th of January reached me in Boston while I was 
upon the wing, where I have been ever since, I 
wanted to reply at once, but I was to come to 
Philadelphia this evening, and I hoped to see you 
and say what was too long to write. But it seems 
that I am so dangerous a fellow that no hall-owner 
in Philadelphia will risk the result of my explosive 
words, and not a place can be had for my fanat- 
ical and incendiary criticism of Thackeray ; so I 
shall not see you. Four words in Seward's speech 
explain it, and especially " justify " it, as you use 
the word, — " Concession short of principle." Do 
you ask what and why we should concede ? Mr. 
Adams answers ; he has learned from history and 
common sense that no government does wisely 
which, however lawful, moderate, honest, and con- 



142 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

stitutional, treats any popular complaint, however 
foolish, unnecessary, and unjustifiable, with haughty 
disdain. 

Those sentences of Seward and Adams furnish 
the key to our position, and the wise triumphant 
policy of the new administration. You have no 

- fear of Lincoln, of course. Well, do you suppose 
that his secretary of state makes such a speech 
at such a time without the fullest understanding 
with his chief ? Does any man think that the plan 
of the new government could wisely be exposed 
in advance while the traitors had yet nearly two 
months of legal power ? Seward's speech indicates 
the spirit of the new government, a kindly spirit. 
Special measures he does not mention, saying only 
no measure will compromise the principle of the 
late victory. In his cg^reer of thirty-seven years 
you will find that under every party name he has 
had but one central principle, — that all our diffi- 

. culties, including the greatest, are solvable under 
our Constitution and within the Union. And the 
Union is not what slavery chooses to decree. It is 
a word which has hitherto been the cry of a party 
which sought to rule or ruin the government, with- 
out the slightest regard to its fundamental idea. 
Now the people have pronounced for that idea, and 
now therefore, when a Republican says Union, he 
means just what the fathers meant, — not union 
for union, but union for the purpose of the union. 
But you say he subordinates his party to the union. 
Yes, again, but why ? Because (as he said two 



THE EVE OF THE WAR. 143 

years ago, when, thanks to Hickman and the rest, 
the Leeompton crime was prevented), because 
" the victory is won," the peculiar purpose of the 
party has been achieved, the territories are free. 
Even South Carolina concedes that. The South 
allows that we have beaten them in the territories, 
and they secede because they think we must go on 
and emancipate in the District and navy yards, and 
then, from the same necessity of progress to retain 
power, emancipate in the States. Remember that 
by the bargain of 1850 New Mexico has a right to 
come in slave or free. Mr. Adams proposes that 
she shall come now, if she wants to ; that is all. 
And he and Seward, and I suppose you and I, 
know perfectly well that she will come free. Yet 
even Seward says that, while he would have no ob- 
jection to voting for such an enabling act, he is not 
quite sure that it could be constitutionally done. 

I shall not tire your soul out by going on, but if 
we could sit for an evening in MacVeagh's office 
and smoke the calumet of explanation and consid- 
eration, I am perfectly sure that I could make you 
feel that Seward is greater at this moment than 
ever before. At least wait^ wait until something 
is done, before you believe that a man who is a 
Democrat in the only decent sense, — who believes 
fully and faithfully in a popular government, who 
for nearly forty years, under the stinging stress of 
obloquy and slander and the doubt of timid friends, 
has stood cheerfully loyal to the great idea of lib- 
erty, and has seen his country gradually light up 



144 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

and break into the day of the same conviction, with 
the tragedies of Clay and Webster before him per- 
fectly comprehended by him, with a calmness and 
clearness of insight and a radical political faith 
which they never had, — wait, I say, and do not 
think that such a man has forsworn himself, his 
career, and his eternal fame in history, until you 
have some other reason for believing it than that, 
when his country is threatened with civil war, he 
says he will do all that he can to avoid it except 
betray his principles. 

All things are possible. Great men have often 
fallen in the very hour of triumph. But my faith 
in great men survives every wreck, and I will not 
believe that our great man is going until I see that 
he is gone. Indeed, as I feel now, I should as soon 
distrust my own loyalty as Seward's, and what can 
any individual say more ? 

Believe me, full of faith, your friend, 

George William Curtis. 

In one of the crowded days of that eventful 
April, Curtis wrote to Mr. Norton : — 

Home, 17th April, 1861. 

My dear Charley, — Night before last, at 
eleven o'clock, the loveliest of girls. By midnight 
I was wondering to think how glad and thankful a 
man may be even in the midst of civil war. Frank 
is perfectly fascinated, and laughs with shy delight 
as he calls me to look at the baby's nose, and puts 



THE EVE OF THE WAR. 145 

his finger carefully upon the little soft red cheek. 
If it were not for the bitter days before us, I should 
feel that I was having more than my share of hap- 
piness. 

Three days later to the same friend : — 

20th April, 1861. 

Anna and the baby are perfectly well. Her 
brother Bob and my brother Sam marched yester- 
day with their regiment, the 7th, both the Win- 
throps, Philip Schuyler, and the flower of the youth 
of the city. 

This day in New York has been beyond descrip- 
tion, and remember, if we lose Washington to-night 
or to-morrow, as we probably shall, we have taken 
New York. The grand hope of this rebellion has 
been the armed and moneyed support of New York, 
and New York is wild for the flag and the coun- 
try, and our bitterest foes of yesterday are in good 
faith our nearest friends. The meeting to-day was 
a city in council. The statue of Washington held 
in its right hand the flagstaff and flag of Sumter. 
The only cry is, " Give us arms ! " and this .before 
a drop of New York blood has been shed. What 
will it be after ? 

I think of the Massachusetts boys dead. " Send 
them home tenderly," says your governor. Yes, 
" tenderly, tenderly ; but for every hair of their 
bright young heads brought low, God, by our right 
arms, shall enter into judgment with traitors ! " 



CHAPTEE XII. 

IN THE MIDST OF WAR. 

The next two or three years of Curtis's life may, 
I think, be told, so far as falls within the scope of 
this work, in the extracts from his letters that fol- 
low. There was no marked change in his occupa- 
tions, except such as the war and its interests and 
duties brought. He continued " The Lounger " in 
" Harper's Weekly " and the " Easy-Chair " in the 
magazine, and his lecturing, with the object that 
we know, and the further one which the times im- 
posed, 

TO CHARLES ELIOT NORTON. • 

July 30, '6L 

What a summer it is and has been ! That no- 
thing shall be wanting, we have a comet, too ; a 
comet seen last when Charles Fifth was abdicating 
and Calais was falling, and Elizabeth was coming 
to the throne, and Ben Jonson and Spenser and 
the Dutch William were alive, and Philip Sidney 
was a gray-eyed boy of two. Can you see all that 
in the bushy swash of the comet's tail ? 

Winthrop's death makes a great void in our 
little neighborhood. We all knew him so well and 
loved him so warmly, and he was so much and inti- 



IN TEE MIDST OF WAR. 147 

mately with us, that he seems to have fallen out of 
our arms dead. 

Thank Jane for her most welcome letter. Give 
our dear loves to your dear mother, to Jane and 
Grace ; and may God have us all and our country 
in his holy keeping. 

TO JOHN J. PINKERTO]^. 

North Shore, Richmond Co., N. Y., 
July 9, '61. 

My dear Pinkerton, — I have been long 
meaning to say how d' ye do, and now your note is 
most welcome. No, I stayed at home, resisting 
several very tempting calls, nor shall I be lured to 
any college halls this year. 

I have two brothers at the war, and my wife 
has one. My neighbor and friend, Theodore Win- 
throp, died, at Great Bethel, as he had lived. Many 
other warm friends are in arms, and I hold myself 
ready when the call comes. I envy no other age. 
I believe with all my heart in the cause, and in Abe 
Lincoln. His message is the most truly American 
message ever delivered. Think upon what a millen- 
nial year we have fallen when the President of 
the United States declares officially that this gov- 
ernment is founded upon the rights of man ! Won- 
derfully acute, simple, sagacious, and of antique 
honesty ! I can forgive the jokes and the big hands, 
and the inability to make bows. Some of us who 
doubted were wrong. This people is not rotten. 
What the young men dream, the old men shall see. 



148 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

Well, I will not discuss Seward just now. I do 
not believe him to be a coward or traitor. Chase 
said to a friend's friend of mine last week, " Mr. 
Seward stands by my strongest measures." 

I should like greatly to sit with you and the 
P. M. and the D. A., and talk the night away, even 
if the newspaper did find us out and tattle I But 
I can only shake your hand and theirs, which I do 
with all my heart. 

My wife sends her kind remembrance. We 
have a little girl, born on the day of the Proclama- 
tion. Yours always, 

George William Curtis. 

TO CHARLES ELIOT NORTON. 

July 29, 1861. 

My dear Charles, — I have your notes and 
the good news of Longfellow. A week ago Tom 

Appleton wrote me about himself and L . It 

was a very manly, touching letter. How glad 

I am that L is not crushed by the heavy 

blow ! 

No, nor am I nor the country by our blow. It 
is very bitter, but we had made a false start, and 
we should have suffered more dreadfully in the end 
had we succeeded now. 

The " Tribune," as you see, has changed. There 
was a terrible time there. Its course was quite ex- 
clusively controlled by my friend, Charles Dana. 
The stockholders and Greeley himself at last re- 
belled and Dana was overthrown. It may lead to 



IN THE MIDST OF WAR. 149 

his leaving the " Tribune ; " but for his sake I hope 
not. 

As for blame and causes (for the defeat at Bull 
Run), they are in our condition and character. We 
have undertaken to make war without in the least 
knowing how. It is as if I should be put to run 
a locomotive. I am a decent citizen, and (let us 
suppose) a respectable man, but if the train were 
destroyed, who would be responsible? We have 
made a false start and we have discovered it. It 
remains only to start afresh. 

The only difficulty now will be just that of 
which Mr. Cox's resolutions are an evidence, the 
disposition to ask, " Will it pay ? " And the duty is 
to destroy that difficulty by showing that peace is 
impossible without an emphatic conquest upon one 
side or the other. If we could suppose peace made 
as we stand now, we could not reduce our army by 
a single soldier. The sword must decide this radi- 
cal quarrel. Why not within as well as without 
the Union ? Then, if we win, we save all. If we 

lose, we lose no more. 

Au^st 19, '61. 

I say these things looking squarely at what is 
possible, looking at what we shall be willing to do, 
not what we ought to do. There is very little moral 
mixture in the " anti-slavery " feeling of this coun- 
try. A great deal is abstract philanthropy; part 
is hatred of slave-holders ; a great part is jealousy 
for white labor ; very little is a consciousness of 
wrong done, and the wish to right it. How we 



150 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

hate those whom we have injured. I, too, " trem- 
ble when I reflect that God is just." 

If the people think the government worth sav- 
ing they will save it. If they do not, it is not worth 
saving. And when it is gone, he will be a foolish 
fellow who sees in its fall the end of the popular 
experiment. All that can truly be seen in it will 
be the fact that principles will wrestle for the abso- 
lute control of the system. That is my consolation 
in any fatal disaster. Meanwhile I hope that the 
spirit of liberty is strong enough in our system to 
conquer. 

I am elected a delegate to our State Convention 
on the 11th September. There was a strong effort 
to defeat me, but it was vain. In the reorganiza- 
tion of the County Committee, the opposition tri- 
umphed, though I and my friends were unques- 
tionably strongest. But none of us moved a finger, 
and the enemy had been busy for a fortnight. We 
were displaced in the Committee by a conspiracy 
based upon personal jealousy of me as the " one- 
man ^power" in the distribution of political patron- 
age in the county. I am not sorry at the result, 
for the post of chairman was very irksome, but I 
am sorry for the method, for it is an illustration of 
the way in which we are governed. 

Don't think I am lugubrious about the country, 
for I am really very cheerful. The " old cause " is 
safe, however in our day it may be checked and 
grieved. The heart of New England is true. So 
I believe, is the heart of its child, the West. We 



IN THE MTDST OF WAR. 151 

go out alone to fight Old England's battle, and 
she scoffs and sneers. " The Lord is very tedious," 
said the old nurse, " but he is very sure." 

23d August, '61. 
I am very firm in the faith that there can be 
but the government and anti-government parties, 
and then that the Republican party, though strictly 
loyal, does not by any means include all loyal men, 
and that recent political opponents have a right to 
demand, as a condition of concerted action, that 
some of the candidates shall be taken from among 
them. Is n't this exactly right ? 

7th October, '61. 

Well, and how goes the day in your heart? 
Mrs. Shaw had a few lines from Mrs. Fremont the 
other day. It is fine to see her faith in her hus- 
band. Can there be any who do not wish him well 
and hope for his success ? 

I am putting down some of my thoughts about 

the war in a lecture upon " National Honor." It is 

really a speech upon the times. The Fraternity 

wanted me to open their course upon the 15th, but 

I cannot be ready before the 29th October. Then 

I shall come ; and I shall see you, I hope, though I 

do not know that I can do more than front, fire, 

and fall back. 

2d December, 1861. 

At the Astor we saw General and Mrs. Fre- 
mont. She seems bitter, I think, but he is the 



152 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

same old simple, winning soul that lie always was. 
He is perfectly calm and sweet. He evidently 
thinks the administration do not yet understand 
that there is a war. 

HoiviE, 28tli December, 1861. 

The New London business was utterly dreary. 
The audience was fair, the best they had had, as 
they kindly say to every lecturer, but the course is 
a failure. I came away at twelve, midnight, and 
slept and waked, cold, back to New York. The 
wind had blown the water out of the Connecticut 
(high old Yankee river !) so that we lay for three 
hours upon the shore. I was not very sorry, for it 
prevented our arriving before dawn, and I came in 
upon mother and E. and N. at nine o'clock to 
breakfast. 

I have just read the correspondence of Seward. 
It seems to me admirable and honorable. He 
puts it upon a true ground, — that we, in like cir- 
cumstances, should demand reparation and apology. 
It is calmly and well argued, and the conclusion is 
ingenious and masterly. We have nothing to be 
ashamed of. Our pride may be wounded, but our 
honor is untouched. The third and last trump 
card of the rebellion has failed. 

24th February, 1862. 

My dearest Charles, — The heart of thirty- 
eight, although of course frosted with extreme age, 
is yet sensible of the glow of friendly emotion. 
When Nannie gave me the book this morning, I 



IN THE MIDST OF WAR. 153 

felt, with Coleridge, " And dearer was the mother 
for the child," the wife for the friend. Or, as Emer- 
son has it in his poem of Etienne : — 

*^ The traveler and the road seem one 
With the errand to be done." 

So it seemed this morning. You are always 

thoughtful, always generous. How have I deserved 

such a friend ? 

March 6, '62. 

I think I am a little more cheerful in the 
[Washington] matter than you, because I have 
rather more faith in the President's common sense 
and practical wisdom. His policy has been to hold 
the border States. He has held them ; now he 
makes his next step and invites emancipation. I 
think he has the instinct of the statesman, — the 
knowledge of how much is practicable without 
recoil. From the first he has steadily advanced, 
and there has been no protest against anything he 
has said or done. It is easy to say he has done 
nothing until you compare March 6, '61 and '62. 

As other signs of the current, I observe these 
things in the papers of to-day: 1st, Mr. Adams' 
speech distinctly saying that Slavery is the root of 
all evil ; 2d, Cyrus Field, a stiff old Democrat, re- 
peating it. 3d, Prosper Wetmore introducing into 
our Chamber of Commerce, he an old Commercial 
Democrat, a resolution of thanks to John Bright, 
the eloquent defender, etc., of freedom^ — a word 
that your true-blue pro-slavery modern Democrat 
shies as a bat shies the sun. 



154 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

All the omens are happy, it seems to me. 
For what is it but a question of our national com- 
mon sense ? and if that, as the year has proved, was 
strong enough to smother so furious a party spirit 
as ours in this country, why should we suppose it 
will fail us suddenly ? 

25th March. 

Fletcher Harper has asked me to take into con- 
sideration the writing of a history, a chronicle of 
the war, to be illustrated by the war pictures of the 
" Weekly," a huge (in size) book for popular read- 
ing, and to be especially a Northern book, to show 
what the Rebellion came from, and what its end 
would probably be ! That is not bad for Mr. Har- 
per. I told him that if I wrote about the Rebellion 
I should want to write a proper history ; that his 
work, though admirable in intention, could be but a 
* job' for me ; that the study would be useful to any 
subsequent work upon the subject, but that the 
public never could believe that the later was more 
than a hash of the earlier. He said that I could 
easily do it in three months, and he would pay me 
well, and begged me to think it over.^ 

TO Miss norto:n^. 

June 11, '62. 

Everything is so soft and ample and rich in 

form and color during this month ! Yet I regret 

the rain that makes the freshness, on account of 

Mac and his boys before Richmond. What a pity 

^ The book was not undertaken. 



IN THE MIDST OF WAR. 155 

that we have not a hundred thousand more men, 
so that everything might be as sure as speedy! 
And what a tremendous contest! I go back to 
Persia and Greece and Carthage and Rome to find 
its parallels. The Rebels are as united and sullen 
and desperate as I always knew they must be. 
They hate us with ferocity. The task before us is 
greater than any people ever was called upon to 
accomplish. Great nations have conquered and 
subjugated others, but we have to conquer and as- 
similate half of ourselves. 

TO CHARLES ELIOT NORTON. 

18th June, '62. 

What a resplendent summer! How densely 
rich and blooming ! I am out all I can be. This 
moment A. darts in and out again, asking, "What 's 
your hat on for?" I've just been pruning and 
quiddling, and feeling of the ground with the roots 
of the Virginia creeper (no allusion to McClellan), 
and of the air with the white blossom sprays of the 
deutzia. I am grand in my square foot principal- 
ity ! My patch to me a kingdom is, and that elm- 
tree ! (do you remember it ?) my prime minister. 

Colonel Raasloff waits to see what Congress will 
do about his St. Croix proposition. I have written 
to him that it seems to me we want our Southern 
laborers where they are, but we want them free, and, 
until they are so, I should cry godspeed to any 
man who wanted to escape as a free man to another 
country. Consequently I shall work all the harder 



156 ' GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

upon public opinion to hasten the day of their 
freedom. It is better they should be a " free rural 
population " in their native land, which wants their 
labor, than in another country, is n't it ? 

Colonel Raasloff says, and this is entre nous^ 
that he saw Sumner the day before ; and when the 
colonel said that the war would be long, the Sen- 
ator was evidently " delighted," which R. says he 
was sorry to observe. He says that Speaker Grow 
told him that Congress would not adjourn before 
the middle of July, or certainly until Richmond 
was taken, adding, " The army is encamped before 
Richmond, and we are encamped behind the army." 

Fortunately for us all, Mr. Lincoln is wiser than 
Mr. Summer. He is very wise. 

26th June, '62. 

What an extraordinary paper' by Hawthorne in 
the " Atlantic " ! It is pure intellect, without emo- 
tion, without sympathy, without principle. I was 
fascinated, laughed and wondered. It is as un- 
human and passionless as a disembodied intelli- 
gence. 

North Shore, Sunday, 3d August, '62. 

It is not easy to say who is responsible for this 
extremity. I do not blame any one man ; the diffi- 
culty is ultimately in the nation, but a good deal 
must be shouldered by those who so attacked Mc- 
Clellan that he became the centre of party combi- 
nations. I think that he must soon retire from his 
command, for the faith of his own army is leaving 



IN THE MIDST OF WAR. 157 

him. Yet I think that history will record that he 
was a faithful and devoted citizen and soldier, and 
that, if he was unequal to his task and did not 
know it, it was an ignorance he shared with the 
most accomplished of our military men, and with 
the mass of the people. 

The country seems to me to be making up its 
mind whether it will own itself beaten. But I do 
not lose heart, although in events there is little to 
encourage. I cannot believe that a people which 
has shown itself so singularly ready to learn what 
to do and how to think will fail in this crisis. If 
the government continues to move as fast as the na- 
tion, all is saved. I don't know whether I think it 

will or not. 

Naushon Island,! 11th August, 1862. 

My dear Charles, — Here we have been for a 
week to-morrow, and in the salt sea air we all seem 
to be perfectly well. It is only about thirty miles 
from the southern point of Rhode Island, so I 
breathe my native Narragansett air and am electri- 
fied. The island is about eight miles long and one 
or two broad. It is beautifully broken, with superb 
beech woods rising and opening into bare uplands, 
from which you see the ocean or Vineyard Sound, 
and again opening into sunny, grassy nooks and 
spaces with clusters of shrubs in which the deer lie 
or feed. Day before yesterday we started a pair 
of magnificent bucks. The paths and dells are end- 
less. From the house you have a sea horizon and 

^ The summer residence of Mr. John M. Forbes. 



158 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

the entire sky, with woods almost to the horizon, 
and holding azure crescents of sea (as in " Mand "} 
in their tops. The house is immense, the life sim- 
ple, the hospitality unbounded. To-day the gover- 
nor and three of his suite are here, beside ourselves 
and three or four other visitors. There are riding, 
driving, rowing, sailing, shooting, fishing, billiards, 
dancing, — what you will. You join the doers, or 
you go apart and do nothing or mind your own 
business. Mrs. Forbes is incessantly working on 
preserves and comforts for the soldiers, and we all 
pull lint at intervals. I have been reading here 
Tocqueville's " Ancien Regime." It is very calm 

and wise. 

North Shore, 25tli September, '62. 

My dear Charles, — I hoped to hear from 
you, for I knew you would say what I felt. 

Coming at this moment, when .we were in the 
gravest peril from Northern treachery, the proclam- 
ation clears the air like a northwest wind. We 
know now exactly where we are. There are now 
none but slavery and anti-slavery men in the coun- 
try. The fence is knocked over, and straddling is 
impossible. 

Now^ if my friends nominate me for Congress, 
I shall accept. Success I should like, but I don't 
count upon it. I should stump the district and 
sow the seed. 

When I think of Wilder Dwight and the brave 
victims, my joy is very sober. How the country 
will be filled with mourning as our victory goes on ! 



IN THE MIDST OF WAR, 159 

For victory it must be now. We heard of Bob ^ 
through Dr. Stone. They were both in the thick 
of the fight and escaped unhurt. You saw the ac- 
count of our brave Joe. Think of the service these 
soldiers of less than two years have seen ! I saw a 
banner of Sickles's brigade. It has been in ten 
battles ! 

North Shore, 6th October, 1862. 
As for me and my chances, and the peace of the 
estimable Jane, — which is the only peace I care 
for just now, — they are in great peril ! The 
"outs" in the county here have worked like bea- 
vers against me, who represent the " ins." The 
free and native citizens of the island (especially 
those born trans mare) are resolved that a foreigner 
shall no longer carry the county in his fob. They 
beat me in going to Syracuse, and they have elected 
an anti-Curtis delegation to the Congressional Con- 
vention. There will be an unofficial delegation 
from this county which will urge me upon the Con- 
vention, and will say that I have n't the delegation 
because I refused to work for it. They will also 
say that I shall accept if nominated, although I do 
not think that the nominee will be elected. If they 
say what I have said to them — that for the right 
kind of a man I shall do exactly as I should for 
myself, they will probably secure another nomina- 
tion, — because the convention will say : " Let us, 
then, have a candidate who will unite Richmond." 
I should be very glad to be nominated, and gladder 

1 Robert Gould Shaw. 



160 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

to be elected, but I have not taken the necessary 
steps.^ 

I am going up to town this evening to dine with 
Colonel Raasloff and Count Pij)er and two or three 
more. The colonel goes to China immediately. I 
shall have to espouse the proclamation and make 
them like it, which they do not yet. 

Lowell, December 10, '62. 
I had a very large audience this evening, and 
the lecture was admirably received. One man 
said, in the Cambridge vein, " He is a very dan- 
gerous man, he j)uts it so plausibly ! " An Ameri- 
can says so of the doctrine of the Declaration ! 
You see there is work before us. 

New Yokk, December 15, '62. 
I am at my mother's, — a house of mourning. 
On Saturday afternoon my brother Joe fell dead 
at the head of his regiment, ending at twenty-six 
years a stainless life in the holiest cause and in 
the most heroic manner. God rest his noble soul, 
and grant us all the same fidelity ! My mother, 
who has felt the extreme probability of the event 
from the beginning, is as brave as she can be ; but 
it is a fearful blow. She does not regret his going, 
and she knew the risk, but who can know the pang 
until it comes ? ^ 

^ He was not nominated. 

^ Joseph Bridgham Curtis was born in Providence, R. I., Oc- 
tober 25, 1836. Educated as a civil engineer at the Lawrence 



IN THE MIDST OF WAR. 161 

December 28, '62. 
This Will be a crucial week. The counter pro- 
clamation, the edict of emancipation, the opposi- 
tion of Seymour & Co., and the mad desperation 
of the reaction, — all will not avail. The war must 
proceed, and to its natural result. Even Joseph 
Harper, the most Southern of the firm, said to 
me yesterday, '' The negroes must be armed, and if 
Seymour does not support the war he will have no 
support." Perhaps, if any possible way of settle- 
ment could be devised, there might be a strong 
party for it, but in deep water we must swim or 
drown. All our reverses, our despondence, our 
despairs, bring us to the inevitable issue: shall 
not the blacks strike for their freedom ? 

February 6, 1863. 

Why should Dr. Holmes trouble himself about 
the base of McClellan's brain? McClellan has 



Scientific School, Cambridge, Mass., he entered the Union ser- 
vice at the outbreak of the war in 1861 as engineer on the staff 
of the Ninth Regiment of the New York State National Guard. 
On the organization of the Fourth Rhode Island Regiment, he was 
appointed Adjutant. He served with Burnside at Roanoke and 
in the Army of the Potomac. The regiment was cut to pieces 
at Antietam, and fell back in disorder. Lieutenant Curtis seized 
the colors, shouting, " I go back no further ! What is left of 
the Fourth Rhode Island, form here ! " But there was not enough 
left to form, and Curtis, for the rest of the day, fought as a pri- 
vate in an adjoining command. He was made Lieutenant-Colonel 
on the reorganization of the regiment, and was in command at 
Fredericksburg. He was instantly killed at the head of his men 
on the evening of the battle of December 13, 1862. 



162 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

nothing to do with, all this McClellanization of the 
public mind. The reaction requires a small Demo- 
crat with great military j)restige for its presiden- 
tial candidate. The new programme, you know, is 
a new conservative party of Republicans and Dem- 
ocrats, and all mankind except Abolitionists. It 
will work, I think, for as a party we have broken 
down. I blame nobody. It was inevitable. The 
" Tribune," through the well-meaning mistakes of 
Greeley, has been forced to take (in the public 
mind, which is the point) the position of W. Phil- 
lips, — the Union if possible, emancipation anyhow. 
As a practical political position that is not ten- 
able. If, by any hocus-pocus, the war order of 
emancipation should be withdrawn, we should be 
lost forever, beyond McClellan's power, assisted 
by John Van Buren, the " Boston Courier " and 
" Post " and the '' New York Herald," to save us. 
There 's nothing for us but to go forward and save 
all we can. 

February 14, '63. 

General Burn side came to see mother a day or 
two since. He spoke with utmost respect and love 
of Joe. He said that he was one of the few officers 
that '' rose " in the fight ; that his coolness, valor, 
and sagacity kept pace ; and that he would have 
been necessarily a distinguished officer. Dear 
hoy ! I see his calm, sweet, dead face, and I think 
of his lovely life, " wrapped sweet in his shroud, 
the hope of humanity not yet extinguished in 
him." 



IN THE MIDST OF WAR. 163 

TO JOHN J. PINKERTON". 

February 17, 1863. 

The fate of the country is being settled in this 
lull. If it awakes divided, we have a long, sharp 
fight before us all. The instinct of union, if not 
stronger than that of liberty, in this people, as 
Mr. Seward once said, is yet too strong to be 
squelched like a tallow dip. There was never 
but one government that merely tumbled down 
and died, and that was Louis Philippe's ! We 
are too young, and the government has been too 
long consciously a general benefit, to allow such 
a result here. Even Vallandigham, braying to 
Copperheads in New Jersey, is obliged to say that 
he is for union. John Van Crow has jumped to 
the dominant tune, and the wayward sisters are 
rebels to be put down. The " Herald " is afraid 
of the '' Express " and " World " for rushing reac- 
tion into absurdity, and plants itself square upon 
war. Bennett told Mahoney, when he asked him 
to print his letter, that he was a damned fool. 

When the question is fairly put, " Shall we 
whittle this great sovereign power down to a Vene- 
zuela or Guatemala?" if the soul of the people 
does not snort scorn and defiance, then good-night 
to Marmion. 

I feel steadily cheerful, and yet, as you know, 
I am a traveler, not a recluse. 

Do you mean that you have evacuated West 
Chester finally ? What says MacVeagh ? My 
friendly regards to him if ever you write. 

Faithfully yours, George William Curtis. 



164 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

TO CHARLES ELIOT NORTON. 

11th March, 1863. 

Not only has the reaction consumed itself, but 
it is of the greatest significance that the result is 
not due to a victory, but is a purely intellectual and 
moral recuperation. I have been very sure that, 
when the Democratic party found that they could 
not operate on the base of peace, they would hurry 
over to war, as McClellan from the Pamunkey to 
the James. But the movement shows that the 
strongest and most sagacious men of the party are 
its old Southern leaders. Jeff and his friends have 
known from the beginning that it was a war of 
ideas, which had exhausted compromise and had to 
fight. The Northern Democrats refuse to acknow- 
ledge the truth, but they are forced to act upon it, 
which comes practically to the same thing. 

The following letter refers to incidents following 
the draft riots in New York in July, 1863, by far 
the most exciting experience of any Northern com- 
munity during the war. The disturbance was started 
by an attack upon a building in which the provost- 
marshal was conducting the draft. Most of the 
militia were absent in Pennsylvania ; there was but 
a small number of Federal troops available ; the 
police, taken by surprise, were for two days able to 
do but little in restraining, and nothing in repressing 
the mob, which, with the usual rage for plunder 
and destruction, showed especial fury against the ne- 
groes, on whom atrocious outrages were committed. 



IN THE MIDST OF WAR. 165 

New York, July 19th, '63. 

On Tuesday evening, upon an intimation from 
a man who had heard the plot arranged in the city 
to come down and visit me that night, and find 
Horace Greeley and Wendell Phillips, " who were 
concealed in my house," I took the babies out of 
bed and departed to an unsuspected neighbor's. 
On Wednesday a dozen persons informed me and 
Mr. Shaw that our houses were to be burned ; and 
as there was no police or military force upon the 
island, and my only defensive weapon was a large 
family umbrella, I carried Anna and the two babies 
to James Sturgis's in Roxbury. Frank was with 
Mrs. Shaw at Susie Minturn's up the river. To- 
day I am going with him to Eoxbury, but shall re- 
turn immediately, so that I cannot see you. We 
have now organized ourselves in the neighborhood 
for mutual defense, and I do not fear any serious 
trouble. 

The good cause gains greatly by all this trouble. 
The government is strong enough to hold New 
York, if necessary, as it holds New Orleans, Balti- 
more, and St. Louis. There must be a great deal 
more excitement, and if Seymour can bring the 
State, under a form of law, against the national 
government, he will do it. It will be done by a 
state decision of the unconstitutionality of the con- 
scription act. But as a riot it has been suppressed, 
as an insurrection it has failed. No Northern con- 
spiracy for the rebellion can ever have so fair a 
chance again as it had in this city last week, with- 



166 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

out soldiers, with a governor friendly to the mob, 
and with only a splendid police which did its duty 
as well as Grant's army. 

TO JOHN J. PINKERTON. 

North Shore, Staten Island, 
2d October, 1863. 

My dear Pinkerton, — I wish you joy with 
all my heart, and the voice of a married man of 
seven years ought to have some weight in felicita- 
tion. It has always seemed that my fancy was fleet 
enough to outrun the fact, and yet I have been 
always distanced. As a lover you think marriage 
is a very Paradise, but as a husband you will feel 
that it was the beginning of life. But I leave the 
sermon to the good clergyman who will breathe 
upon you the heavenly benediction for your voyage. 
I only stand on the shore and fling after you my 
well-worn marriage slipper, and believe all that you 
know of your companion, and whistle for the soft- 
est and most favorable gales. God bless you and 
yours always. 

Your friend, 

George William Curtis. 

TO CHARLES ELIOT NORTON. 

15th October, 1863. 

Whatever is happening to Meade, let us rejoice 
over Pennsylvannia and Ohio. It is the great vin- 
dication of the President, and the popular verdict 
upon the policy of the war. It gives one greater 



I^r TEE MIDST OF WAR. 167 

joy than any event which has lately happened. Is 
it not the sign of the final disintegration of that 
rotten mass known as the Democratic party ? In 
this State we have sloughed off the name Republi- 
can and are known as the Union party. How glad 
I am that we can gladly bear that name, and that 
the Union at last means what it was intended by 
the wisest and the best of our fathers to mean ! 

24tli October, 1863. 
What a splendid succession to the editorship of 
the ancient quarterly ! The great literary question 
of this epoch in my mind has always been, who pays 
for the " North American " ? (I do not mean the 
writers, dear Mr. Editor, but the running expenses 
of the institution). I am sincerely glad that you 
and Lowell have taken it in hand, but mv own 
are so full that I cannot promise you anything, now 
at least. I am at another lecture, and rewriting 
my oration of September 1, and am speaking here- 
abouts in the canvass, and go to a Loyal League on 
Monday evening in Bridgeport and keep the mill 
going pretty steadily. I have a busy winter of 
lecturing before me." 



CHAPTER XIIL 

EDITOR OF "harper's WEEKLY." 

In 1863 — I have not been able to fix the exact 
date — Mr. Curtis became the political editor of 
'' Harper's Weekly." His relations with Harper 
& Brothers had always been intimate and cordial. 
They had published his books ; he had for nearly 
ten years been a regular writer for the Monthly, 
and later for the Weekly. Fletcher Harper, in 
whose charge were the periodicals, had long been a 
trusted and beloved friend and adviser. The Weekly 
was then, as it is still, the most important illustrated 
paper of the country, and had a very large num- 
ber of readers. Before the outbreak of the war, its 
tone in politics had been conservative and mild, so 
that it was the habit of the " Tribune " in its more 
radical moods — the moods of that journal were by 
no means consistently radical — to speak of Har- 
per's as a " Journal of Weakly Civilization," a mot 
which in those hot times had much vogue. When, 
however, slavery led to secession, and secession to 
rebellion, the Weekly gave to the government of 
Mr. Lincoln and to the Union Republican party 
hearty support. Mr. Curtis took control as editor 
with a perfectly clear understanding, equally hon- 



EDITOR OF HARPER'S WEEKLY, 169 

orable to him and to the publishers, that he was to 
have entire independence. He could not otherwise 
have taken it at all, nor could he have made of the 
journal the power that it became. At first and for 
some time he did only a part of the writing for the 
editorial page, but gradually did more and more 
until, for some years before his death, except in 
rare instances (chiefly when he was ill), the entire 
page was from his pen. He retained his home on 
Staten Island, and could never be persuaded, though 
often urged, to remove to the city. Doubtless it was 
the better plan. He lost something in absence from 
the daily intercourse with men, and the daily parti- 
cipation in affairs, but he gained more in the dispo- 
sition of his time, which was always urgently occu- 
pied, leaving him but very little that could be called 
leisure. His semi-rural life also gave him two 
privileges of the greatest value to him, — a certain 
amount of seclusion with his family, safe from the 
incessant and consuming interruptions almost inevi- 
table in the city, and a certain amount of unforced 
intercourse with nature, and these counted for much 
in that fine serenity of character, that calmness 
wedded to vigor in his spirit, which marked him 
as a man apart in the strenuous times in which his 
part was so large, so important, and so exacting. 

In one sense, the taking of the editorship of the 
Weekly was a decisive step in the life of Mr. Cur- 
tis. He did not and could not cease to be a man 
of letters, a student, and in certain broad fields a 
scholar. His writing in the '' Easy-Chair," which 



170 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

of itself sufficed to fill a volume each year, contin- 
ued and was purely literary. Some of his editorial 
writing was almost equally so, and all of it was ex- 
ecuted with sustained fidelity to his literary stand- 
ard, so far as conditions permitted ; and his stand- 
ard was high. He was still to produce that series of 
orations, some of which — that on Bryant, that on 
Lowell, that on the unveiling of the statue of Wash- 
ington, that at Gettysburg — have a very high 
value, and must always have, wholly apart from the 
charm or impressiveness of their delivery. But 
from this time on, his chief interest and occupation 
were to be with the public affairs of the time, and, 
indeed, of the day ; he was in the movement of his 
country, shared it, was swayed by it, and in no small 
degree contributed to its direction. 

The readers he addressed were far more numer- 
ous than books could reach, but what he said to 
them was necessarily briefly said, generally for a 
specific purpose, often a temporary one, on matters 
of supreme moment at the time, often also of endur- 
ing interest, but demanding instant action which 
he sought to influence. The editor of even a weekly 
journal is rather a talker than a writer. He keeps 
up a continual one-sided conversation on whatever 
he deems of greatest immediate concern, and his 
subjects may be of infinite variety, but none of 
them can at any one time be treated completely, or 
with any detailed preparation. 

Mr. Curtis, moreover, was active in the affairs 
he discussed, and his action and his writing, with 



EDITOR OF HARPER'S WEEKLY. 171 

a common object of the most absorbing nature, 
left him scant time for purely scholarly pursuits. 
From time to time, as after the death of Mr. Lin- 
coln, there came to him pressing suggestions and 
solicitations for historical and biographical work 
that would have given scope for the more sustained 
exercise of his literary powers ; but he put them 
aside, not without reluctance, and even something 
of the despairing pang that the strong man must 
feel in the presence of the relentless limitations of 
time, but with firmness. He had chosen his path- 
way with the conscientious care and deliberation 
that in him were both native and cultivated, and 
no considerations less strong or worthy than those 
that had determined his choice could swerve him 
from it. 

Mr. Curtis entered on the editorship of the 
Weekly at the crisis of the War for the Union. 
Gettysburg had been fought and won, Vicksburg 
had fallen, Sherman in the West and Grant in the 
East were about to enter on that tremendous series 
of movements and battles between the slowly con- 
verging forces of which the rebellion was to be 
crushed. The proclamation of emancipation had 
determined the purpose of the final struggle on 
both sides, and what the issue must be if the gov- 
ernment should succeed. Mr. Curtis, and those 
who with him had felt that the war was in reality 
resistance to the aggressions of slavery, felt now 
that the enemy was unmasked, and pursued their 
course with a deeper determination and more ex- 



172 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

alted courage. On the other hand, the opposition 
to the government, though on the whole much weak- 
ened, was intensified and embittered. The senti- 
ment of distrust and dislike of " radicalism," bred 
of long party association with the South when it 
dominated the government and controlled the hon- 
ors and profits of politics, became more sullen and 
implacable. The burdens of the war were heavy. 
The conscription for the army, harsh enough where 
it was honestly made, and rendered often odious by 
the corruption to which the provision for filling 
state quotas by counties gave rise, spread an angry 
suspicion throughout the country, especially in the 
larger cities of the East, of which the politicians of 
the opposition were quick to avail themselves. The 
possibility of foreign complications, and the almost 
hopeless difficulty of contending with them if they 
should occur, were plain enough to the most san- 
guine. The confusion in the national councils, and 
particularly in Congress, inseparable from the vast- 
ness, the stress, and the novelty of the situation, was 
obvious. Mr. Lincoln's term was drawing to a 
close, and the occurrence of a presidential election 
in the midst of civil war, with all its tremendous 
possible consequences, was an ordeal which patriot- 
ism and faith could face, but as to which wisdom 
and experience could give no ray of hope or guid- 
ance. 

In this situation the work undertaken by Mr. 
Curtis was of the highest importance. He proved 
from the outset well fitted for it, and, though he 



EDITOR OF HARPER'S WEEKLY. 173 

felt profoundly the responsibility imposed by it, this 
rather steadied and impelled than dismayed him. 
The work was to be done ; the need of it was instant 
and incessant. His general ideas of the purpose of 
the war, the policy of the government, the duty of 
the citizen, were well defined. In their application 
to the questions of the hour, as they presented them- 
selves, he developed a soundness of judgment, and 
a capacity for persuasive and convincing argument, 
that nothing in his previous career had indicated. 
His editorial style, though with time and practice 
it was developed, was from the first peculiarly indi- 
vidual, and so entirely unlike any other that at any 
time for thirty years a stray quotation from '' Har- 
per's Weekly " could easily be recognized by an ha- 
bitual reader. And yet it was curiously unlike Mr. 
Curtis's style in any other line. It rarely betrayed 
the eloquence of the orator, the charm of the essay- 
ist, or the wit and grace and fancy of the humorist. 
It was extremely simple, direct, clear, and some- 
times even homely. I have spoken of the editor as 
a talker. Mr. Curtis's editorials are an admirable 
example of the excellence to which talking of this 
kind can attain. He seemed to have his reader as 
clearly in his mind as if he were sitting before him, 
and he reasoned with him, appealed to him, sug- 
gested to him, as he would have done had their eyes 
met. And the editor did not make the mistake 
of either overrating or underrating the person to 
whom he addressed himself. I have sometimes 
thought that this imaginary companion was con- 



174 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

ceived by him witli a very serious reference to the 
character of the Weekly as it was when he took 
charge of it, and that his typical reader was one 
who primarily liked to look at pictures, and whose 
interest, thus attracted, was to be directed by the 
writer. Then Mr. Curtis, with all his unusual gifts, 
had at heart a deep and wholesome sympathy with 
men. Separated from the great body of them as 
he was, and, so far as these gifts were concerned, 
raised above them, he never betrayed a sign that 
he felt either separate or superior. The reason 
and conscience, the patriotism, self-respect, fair- 
ness, common sense, to which he appealed, were 
the qualities of which he was conscious in himself, 
and which he with perfect sincerity attributed to 
others. 

A familiar form of Mr. Curtis's way of putting 
things in his editorials was by questions. These he 
used with good effect. They were not artful, and 
were not often sarcastic. They seemed to be the 
natural development of the reasoning that had con- 
vinced him, and they served the double purpose of 
awakening the reader's interest and guiding his 
mental processes. Fromentin, the keenest and 
clearest of analysts in his own domain, says of the 
art of painting that it " is but the art of expressing 
the invisible by the visible." This subtle defini- 
tion appears to me to apply to Mr. Curtis's edito- 
rial writing. The principles he sought to apply 
were thought out by him with the utmost care. 
The particular cases of their application were 



EDITOR OF HARPER'S WEEKLY. 175 

searchingly studied and maturely considered. He 
had a sort of personal fondness for the opposite 
side to his own, and was constantly making a 
better statement of it than that of his opponents. 
He brought to the discussion of the public affairs 
of the hour a wealth of knowledge, historical, con- 
temporary, practical, and a thoroughness of reflec- 
tion, which are unusual even with writers of the 
most deliberate and elaborate kind. One has but 
to read his orations to find the evidence of these 
qualities, and of the skill with which he could mar- 
shal a long array of facts in support of a logical 
conclusion. In "Harper's Weekly" he gave us 
the fruit of these capacities, but rarely any sign 
of them in exercise. The simplest-minded reader 
could feel the force of his reasoning; only the 
more highly trained could understand from what 
deep and widely-fed sources that force was supplied. 
It is a natural question whether the journal af- 
forded the best field for the use of such powers, 
and whether they might not better have been di- 
rected where their possessor would have been more 
conspicuously recognized and his achievements more 
splendid. I shall not undertake to answer the 
question. I am restrained, at the outset, by my 
knowledge of the conscientiousness with which Mr. 
Curtis decided his own course, and of the gen- 
eral soundness of his judgment. I can only say 
that the influence he exerted in the direction of his 
aims — and we know how high these were — must 
have been very great. When from time to time 



176 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

on rare occasions his name came before the coun- 
try in a way to call out public sentiment, he was 
overwhelmed with grateful surprise at the depth 
and extent of the respect, the confidence and the 
affection he had, all unconsciously, inspired. These 
would have been a rich capital for him in public 
life, and I have no doubt that that capital would 
have increased and multiplied in any place of 
power and responsibility that could have come to 
him. But the public feeling toward him was but 
a faint indication of the influence he really exerted 
in "Harper's Weekly," for only a very small num- 
ber of the tens of thousands, often the hundreds 
of thousands, to whom he spoke week by week 
for almost thirty years, associated his name with 
his writing, or had the dimmest knowledge of his 
personality. The sentiment that at intervals, — 
sadly few they seem to one who cares to consider 
fame as a reward for merit — found expression was 
instilled most largely in the minds of those who 
knew the writer by the qualities his writing exhib- 
ited. But the qualities were the same for those 
who did not know him. When I recall the his- 
tory of his country from the issue of the Emancipa- 
tion Proclamation to the close of Mr. Curtis' s life, 
with the long line of vital questions, which by the 
growth and evolution of the American nation were 
submitted to the arbitrament of public opinion, and 
reflect with what wisdom and fidelity, what cour- 
age and unselfishness, he labored for what he be- 
lieved the right, and what experience has already 



EDITOR OF HARPER'S WEEKLY. Ill 

shown was in the main the right, I cannot but 
feel that the great share of the labor that was 
given to the editor's work was richly rewarded, 
as he would have rated reward. 

In 1864 came the presidential election. There 
was early shown a very pronounced and apparently 
strong opposition to Mr. Lincoln's renomination. 
It was manifested most distinctly by what was 
known as the "radical" element of the Republican 
party, whose leaders felt that the President had 
advanced much too slowly toward the destruction 
of slavery. With these men Mr. Curtis had sym- 
pathy so far as their hatred of slavery was involved, 
and their feeling that it was the source of the re- 
bellion. With their distrust or disapproval of the 
President he had no sympathy. He felt that Lin- 
coln was perfectly sound in purpose, that his judg- 
ment was on the whole safe, that he was entitled 
to decide since his responsibility was so great, and 
that he was in a position to know best what, for 
the whole country, was best. Still more keenly 
he felt that whatever were the President's possible 
errors, the risk of any change was appalling. And 
he had, moreover, a very just perception of the 
actual condition and tendency of public opinion, 
and it agreed with the President's estimate of it. 
He wrote to Mr. Norton (April 7, 1864) : — 

" My dear Charles, — How grandly the coun- 
try is speaking for the war and the policy ! Night 
before last I dined with Colonel Raasloff^ and 

1 The Danish Minister. 



178 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

Count Piper and Habricht, and I claimed that thus 
far we had proved that in a republic patriotism 
was not necessarily subordinated to party spirit. 
It seems just now as if our true victory were to be 
greater than even we had supposed. 

" I have seen Lincoln tete-a-tete since I saw you, 
and my personal impression of him confirmed my 
previous feeling. I am sorry that Fremont seems 
to be placed in a position which can please no real 
friend of his. Only to-day I have an invitation 
from the office of ' The New Nation ' to meet 
some friends of all the radical candidates to ' take 
steps to form a radical national committee, and to 
secure a radical platform, and a reliable radical 
man for the presidential campaign about to open.* 
Last week I went to Baltimore, and supped at the 
Union Club with a dozen of the most strenuous 
men there. Every one, when the war beg'an, was a 
pro-slavery man ; now they will have nothing but 
immediate, uncompensated emancipation. Charles, 
you and I are superannuated fogies." 

Mr. Curtis was chosen as a delegate to the Re- 
publican National Convention of 1864 held in Bal- 
timore. He was an ardent and eifective supporter 
of Mr. Lincoln's nomination. A glimpse of his 
work there is afforded in a letter (June 16, '64), to 
Mr. Norton : — 

" My dear Charles, — I hope you like our Bal- 
timore work. The unanimity and enthusiasm were 
most imposing. I voted against the admission of 
Tennessee, because I did not want the convention 



EDITOR OF HARPERS WEEKLY, 179 

to meddle with the question; and, since she only- 
wanted to come in to help do what we were sure to 
do without her, I thought that, as the cause was ex- 
actly the same for both of us, she should give us 
forbearance while we gave her sympathy. But it 
was impossible to resist the torrent, and they all 
came in. There is no harm done. I cannot but 
think Sumner wrong. If all New York rebels, I 
am still a citizen of the United States. That is the 
simple, obvious, necessary ground. 

" The committee of one from each State appointed 
me to write the official letter to the President, and 
refused to instruct me. I sent it yesterday, having 
read it to Mr. Bryant and to Raymond. They 
were both entirely pleased with everything in it." 

In the canvass that followed on the nomination 
of Mr. Lincoln, and that of General George B. Mc- 
Clellan by the Democrats, Mr. Curtis worked with 
the utmost vigor, spirit, and patience. His part in 
the Baltimore Convention had won for him a posi- 
tion of influence in the party, which for him car- 
ried with it a full corresponding responsibility. In 
the columns of " Harper's Weekly," in his constant 
and wide correspondence and in his speeches, he 
did all that he could to guide and arouse public 
opinion. His labors were incessant, and often amid 
harassing events which, though they could not fail 
to give him the utmost anxiety, he met with cheer- 
ful courage and often with humor. He wrote to 
Mr. Norton, July 12, 1864, when General Grant's 
movement toward Petersburg had left the capital 



180 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

and the Pennsylvania border exposed to possible 
raids by Confederate cavalry : — 

" And how is Ashfield ? I should have written 
you there before if I had supposed there was a 
post-office at such a height. Do you have to eat 
oil more than three times a day to keep warm in 
this weather ? We don't. But then we live upon 
an island in the temperate zone. Or are you warmed 
by the news of the isolation of Washington ? There 
is something comical about it which I cannot escape, 
with all the annoyance. The great Dutch Penn- 
sylvania annually sprawling on its back, and bel- 
lowing to mankind to come and help it out of the 
scrape, is perfectly ludicrous. I hope that this year 
all the States will learn that, while they have no 
efficient and organized militia, they will be con- 
stantly harassed by raids to the end of the war. 
We have all kinds of rumors here at every moment, 
from which you are free. But the sense of absurd- 
ity and humiliation is very universal. These things 
weaken the hold of the administration upon the 
people ; and the only serious peril that I foresee is 
the setting in of a reaction which may culminate 
in November and defeat Lincoln, as it did Wads- 
worth in this State. I wish we had a loyal governor, 
and that New York city was virtuous." 

In the stress of the deadly struggle for the life 
of the nation Mr. Curtis's mind turned frequently 
to the study of the hardly less difficult struggles 
that attended the foundation of the government. 

" Have you thought," he wrote to Mr. Norton, 



EDITOR OF HARPER'S WEEKLY, 181 

" what a vindication this war is of Alexander Ham- 
ilton? I wish somebody would write his life as it 
ought to be written, for surely he was one of the 
greatest of our great men, as Jefferson was the 
least of the truly great ; or am I wrong ? Hamil- 
ton was generous and sincere. Was Jefferson 
either ? In Franklin's life how the value of tem- 
perament shows itself! It was as fortunate for 
him and for us as his genius." 

Another letter to the same friend (August 28th) 
reports his first degree of LL. D., — a title, by the 
way, which he never used, or allowed, if he could 
help it, to be attached to his name, even after he 
had received the right to it from Harvard, — and 
also shows the tone of public opinion at that 
date : — 

North Shore, 28tli August, '64. 

Frank wrote me, or printed rather, in large and 
remarkable capitals, a letter the other day. I en- 
livened the tranquil circle here by calling it a Cap- 
ital letter, — a little work of mine which I dedicate 
to Jane. Probably you are not aware that I am 
myself the latest little work of Madison University. 
Blushes forbid me to write that that discriminating 
institution has done for the least of your friends 
what Harvard did for that other celebrated scholar, 
Andrew Jackson. Yesterday I received a letter 
with a very large green seal, addressed " G. W. C, 
LL. D. ! " Oh my prophetic soul ! I have long 
called Frank and Zib Doctor. 

I say not a word about the war, but did people 



182 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

ever deserve success at the polls less than the Union 
party? Two years ago I was the only Lincoln 
man I knew hereabouts, and I have come round to 
the same position. Yet he will be elected, or we 
are dreary humbugs. 

• • • • • •-• o • 

Good-by, dear boy. I am more cheerful than 
ever, for within two months we shall see the whole 
force of treason North and South, and if we sink 
't is to see what we shall see ! I shall not be able 
to write on Peace — luckily for you. It will be a 
good text for J. K. L. Give him my love, if he is 
with you, and to all the dear ones. 

Your friend the doctor sends his benediction. 

A week later is an allusion to General Burnside, 
for whom he had the utmost affection and re- 
spect : — 

East Greenwich, Monday, 5th September, 1864. 

My dear Charles, — Burnside is staying with 
me here at the house of my cousin, Mr. Goddard. 
Yesterday we sat upon the rocks, and he told me 
the whole story of the mine and of the Army of the 
Potomac. It is intensely interesting and perfectly 
clear. He is the noblest, most magnanimous man 
I ever saw, and I shall tell you the tale with im- 
mense satisfaction some day. On Saturday morn- 
ing, when the news of Sherman's success came, he 
was the most unaffectedly delighted man I ever saw. 
His exultation wound up by his seizing his wife 
and kissing her. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE END OF THE WAR. 

In October Mr. Curtis was nominated for Con- 
gress in his home district. Two years before, his 
friends had pressed his nomination, but, curiously 
enough, it had been defeated by a prejudice against 
him as enjoying too much of the confidence of the 
administration in the matter of appointments, and 
by the independence and impartiality of his recom- 
mendations. The enthusiasm this time '' was such," 
he wrote, " that I quite lost my voice when I came 
to thank the convention. I shall not be elected," 
he added, " but the manner of the nomination was 
better than the matter of the election." Though 
convinced of the hopelessness of the canvass, Mr. 
Curtis saw in it an opportunity for the advance- 
ment of the general cause, and he entered upon it 
with the greatest energy. For the next six weeks 
he spoke almost daily, and sometimes twice a day, 
and always, as described by a friend, "more for 
Lincoln than for himself." 

The crowded days of those eventful months wore 
slowly on. While Grant was painfully fighting 
and forcing his way to cut off Lee's army from 
the South, and Sheridan laid waste the valley of 



184 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

the Shenandoah from which Lee's supplies had 
so largely come, Sherman, after the long series of 
bloody and difficult battles that ended with the 
capture of Atlanta, had begun the great " March to 
the Sea," and Mobile had fallen before the fleet of 
Farragut. The "reaction" was first checked, then 
dissipated by victory, and on the morrow of the 
election Mr. Curtis wrote to Mr. Norton : — 

Hakper's Weekxt, New York, 
9tli November, 1864. 

My dear Charles, — Let us thank God and 
the people for this crowning mercy. I did not 
know how my mind and heart were strained until 
I felt myself sinking in the great waters of this 
triumph. We knew it ought to be ; we knew that, 
bad as we have been, we did not deserve to be 
, put out like a mean candle in its own refuse ; but 
it is never day until the dawn. I do not yet know 
whether Seymour is elected. I hope not, for while 
he is in power this grand State is a base for rebel 
operations; and he is put in power, if at all, by 
those who would make any honorable government 
impossible. My heart sank as I stood among 
drunkards and the worst men, yesterday morning, 
to vote; but it sank deeper when I saw Aaron L., 
and others like him, voting to give those drunkards 
the power of the government. I have prepared 
a very small sermon upon Political Infidelity, for 
what infidels such men are to themselves and to 
mankind ! 

I am defeated, of course, and by a very heavy 



THE END OF THE WAR. 185 

majority. In my own county my vote would have 
been largest of all the Union candidates if my 
name could have been sent to the soldiers, as the 
governor's was. As it is, he is some twenty before 
me. But Fernando Wood and James Brooks are 
defeated — God be praised ! I have never been 
deceived about myself, but I am forever glad that 
my name was associated with this most memorable 
day. Yours most affectionately, 

G. W. C. 

During the winter that followed, feeling that 
the triumph of the national cause was now only 
a question of time, and of brief time, Mr. Curtis 
devoted the opportunities of the lyceum platform, 
which no one commanded more completely than 
he, to the education of the public mind in what he 
believed to be the lesson of the war. The lecture 
on " Political Infidelity," alluded to in the last 
letter, was delivered some fifty times in the season 
of 1864 and 1865. One has but to remember the 
interest the addresses of a man like Mr. Curtis 
aroused in every town, large or small, where he was 
heard, the intense feeling of the people throughout 
the North as to all questions related to the war, 
the eager discussion that followed a lecture of this 
sort in each community, to understand the scope 
and the depth of the influence he exerted. The 
lecture was in effect a fervent plea for perfect 
freedom of discussion. Slavery had brought the 
country to civil war, because slavery was the sole 



186 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

question in our political history as to which discus- 
sion had been entirely suppressed in one part of 
the land, and avoided, discouraged, and by every 
device — political, social, commercial — repressed in 
the other. In the darkness that was thus brought 
about, the South, on the one hand, had formed a 
mistaken notion both of its strength and of the 
position assigned to its policy by the intelligent 
opinion of the world, while on the other hand the 
North mistook the spirit and purpose of the South 
and its own rights and duties. The following 
passage will indicate Mr. Curtis's treatment of 
the first mentioned phase of his subject. Having 
quoted Mr. Seward's description of the domination 
of the slave power, he referred to Alexander H. 
Stephens's retirement from public life in 1859 and 
his farewell speech: "Listen to Mr. Stephens in 
the summer sunshine six years ago : ' As matters 
now stand, so far as the sectional questions are 
concerned, I see no cause of danger either to the 
Union or to Southern security in it. The former 
has been to me, and ought to be to you, subordi- 
nate to the latter. There is not now a spot of the 
public territory of the United States over which 
the national flag floats where slavery is excluded 
by the law of Congress, and the highest tribunal of 
the land has decided that Congress has no power 
to make such a law. At this time there is not a 
ripple upon the surface. The country was never 
in a profounder quiet.' Do you comprehend the 
terrible significance of those words ? He stops ; 



THE END OF THE WAR. 187 

he sits down. The summer sun sets over the fields 
of Georgia. Good-night, Mr. Stephens — a long 
good-night. Look out from your window — how 
calm it is ! Upon Missionary Ridge, upon Look- 
out Mountain, upon the heights of Dalton, upon 
the spires of Atlanta, silence and solitude ; the 
peace of the Southern Policy of Slavery and Death. 
But look! Hark! Through the great five years 
before you a light is shining — a sound is ringing. 
It is the gleam of Sherman's bayonets, it is the 
roar of Grant's guns, it is the red daybreak and 
wild morning music of peace indeed, the peace of 
National Life and Liberty." The application of 
the lesson was plain : " Reconstruct, then, as you 
will. But we are mad if the blood of the war has 
not anointed our eyes to see that all reconstruct 
tion is vain that leaves any question too brittle to 
handle. Whatever in this country, in its normal 
condition of peace, is too delicate to discuss is too 
dangerous to tolerate. Any system, any policy, 
any institution which may not be debated will 
overthrow us, if we do not overthrow it." 

With the opening days of April came the end of 
Lee's obstinate resistance. On the 3d the news of 
the occupation of Richmond by the advance guard 
of the Army of the Potomac reached New York. 
Mr. Curtis wrote to Mr. Norton : — 

Home, 4th April, 1865. 

My dear Charles, — I thought of you all the 
day yesterday as the news of the crowning mercy 
came rolling in. The merchants and brokers in 



188 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

Wall Street came out of their dens and sang Old 
Hundred and John Brown. From the high win- 
dows at the Harpers' where I sat the sky was bril- 
liant and festal with innumerable flags. Fletcher 
Harper came to me, and said, ''How glad I am we 
did not beat at Bull Run, for then Slavery would 
not have been abolished, and we should have been 
worse off than before." My dear boy, who is equal 
to these things ? We hear that the Major Mills 
who has fallen is your young cousin. Ah me ! 
what heart-breaks salute our triumphs. You will 
be very sober in your joy. 

Almost on the morrow the whole nation was 
made " sober in its joy," by the loss of Mr. Lin- 
coln. Mr. Curtis resisted, so far as I am aware, 
all solicitations to address the public, save through 
his paper, on this signal event. In the Weekly 
his expressions were marked by deep feeling, but 
wholly devoid of any tinge of that impulse toward 
vengeance that was at the time so general. " To- 
night," he wrote to a friend, " in the misty spring 
moonlight, as I think of the man we all loved and 
honored, laid quietly to rest upon the prairie, I 
feel that I cannot honor too much, or praise too 
highly, the people that he so truly represented, and 
which, like him, has been faithful to the end. So 
spotless he was, so patient, so tender, — it is a 
selfish, sad delight to me now, as when I looked 
upon his coffin, that his patience had made me 
patient, and that I never doubted his heart, or 



THE END OF THE WAR. 189 

head, or hand. At the only interview I ever had 
with him, he shook my hand paternally at parting, 
and said, ' Don't be troubled. I guess we shall 
get through.' We have got through, at least the 
fighting, and still I cannot believe it. Here upon 
the mantel are the portraits of the three boys 
who went out of this room, my brother, Theo- 
dore Winthrop, and Robbie Shaw. They are all 
dead — the brave darlings — and now I put the 
head of the dear Chief among them, I feel that 
every drop of my blood and thought of my mind 
and affection of my heart is consecrated to secur- 
ing the work made holy and forever imperative 
by so untold a sacrifice. May God keep us all as 
true as they were ! " 

Ah well ! to how many of us came this impulse 
of consecration in that solemn hour. High, in- 
deed, is the fortune of any of us who have re- 
mained as steadfast to it as did Mr. Curtis. 

In the spring of 1865 Mr. Curtis received, 
through Mr. Norton, a proposition to take control 
of a new paper, the purpose of which is sufficiently 
indicated in the following letter, which I give as 
disclosing Mr. Curtis's judgment in matters of this 
sort, and, also, quite explicitly, the peculiar situa- 
tion he himself held in journalism : — 

North Shore, April 26, 1865. 
My dear Chakles, — Yours of the 24th reaches 
me this evening. I cannot at once decide upon 



190 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

the proposition which you make, — for I should 
wish to ask several questions. 

I doubt if 150,000 is capital enough to start 
such a paper as you contemplate, and I am far 
from sure that it is really needed. It seems to me 
always best to use existing machinery if possible, 
and I fear that the influence which would control 
the new paper would constantly tend to make it 
outrun the popular sympathy upon whose support 
it must rely, so far as to defeat its purpose, by 
limiting its circulation to those who need no con- 
version. Do not the " Atlantic," the " North 
American," the "Evening Post," and "Harper's 
Weekly" — to go no further — address the vari- 
ous parts of the audience that are counted upon 
for a new paper, and are there not great advan- 
tages in having the questions presented in these 
different forms ? The change in public sentiment 
upon the true democratic idea is so wide and deep, 
that an organ for special reform in the matter 
does not seem to be required. It — the reform 
— has now become the actual point of the political 
movement of the country ; and the same reasoning 
which justifies the abandonment of the abolition 
societies and organs pleads against your project. 

If I lay more stress upon the special object 
of the paper than its projectors intend, then it 
becomes merely a liberal Weekly of the most ad- 
vanced kind, and I can see no particular reason 
for its success. 

As for myself, I am perfectly free to say what 



THE END OF THE WAR. 191 

I think upon all public questions in " Harper's 
Weekly " without the least trouble or responsibil- 
ity for the details of the paper, and with no ne- 
cessity of even being at the office. The audience 
is immense. The regular circulation is about one 
hundred thousand, and on remarkable occasions, 
as now, more than two hundred thousand. This 
circulation is among that class which needs exactly 
the enlightenment you propose, and access is se- 
cured to it by the character of the paper as an 
illustrated sheet. I should want some very per- 
suasive inducement to relinquish the hold I al- 
ready have upon this audience, for I could not 
hope to regain it in a paper of a different kind. 
Of course, " Harper's Weekly " is not altogether 
such a paper as I should prefer for my own taste ; 
but it does seem to me as if I could do with it the 
very work you propose, and upon a much greater 
scale than in the form you suggest; nor is the 
pecuniary advantage of your offer such as to shake 
this conviction. 

Now from what I say you will see how I feel. 
The offer you make is so handsome and honorable 
that I do not decline it, unless you must have an 
immediate answer. If the affair can still remain 
open, will you tell me if the capital is secured — 
if the paper is to be started anyhow^ — if there 
is any person selected for the business editor — 
whether it is to be a joint-stock association — and 
what the size, etc., of the paper is intended to be. 

If you have the time to inform me upon these 



192 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

and such points, I will not delay long in giving 
you a final answer. 

Always your affectionate, 

G. W. CUETIS. 

Nothing came of the project. 
The following note to Mr. James Russell Low- 
ell relates to the " Commemoration Ode : " — 

AsHFiELD, Mass., 12th September, 1865. 
My dear Lowell, — I thank you with all my 
heart for the noble ode which with all my heart I 
have read and enjoyed. Certainly you have done 
nothing in a loftier strain, nor has anything more 
truly worthy of the great theme been written. If 
it be very serious and very sad it is for the same 
reason that the sky is blue and the corn yellow. 
I have read it aloud to Anna, and read it and 
re-read it to myself ; and I am sure it says what 
the truest American heart feels and believes. And 
if that is not a work worth doing, — if a man can 
do it, what is ? 

The note is signed " Affectionately yours, and 
more and more." 

Mr. Curtis continued to take an active part, 
as well as a strong interest, in politics, and in the 
elections of 1866, he was chosen as a delegate-at- 
large to the Convention for revising the Constitu- 
tion of the State of New York. The Legislature 
of 1867 elected a Senator of the United States 
from New York, and Mr. Curtis's name was pre- 



THE END OF THE WAR. 193 

sented in many of the papers of the Republican 
party. How fitted he was to secure preferment by 
ordinary political methods is shown in a letter to 
Mr. Norton, who had written him on the subject. 

" The only chance," he writes, '^ is a bitter dead- 
lock between the three, or two, chiefs. At present 
(it is a profound secret) the friends of Harris, or 
his chief managers, expect 42 votes in a caucus of 
109, to begin with. The friends of Conkling count 
upon 60 ; those of Davis upon 20. The friends of 
the latter proposed to me to make a combination 
against Conkling, the terms being the election of 
whichever was stronger now, — Davis or me, — 
and the pledges of the successful man to support 
the other two years hence. I declined absolutely." 



CHAPTER XV. 

FOUR YEARS OF POLITICS. 

As the time approached for him to take up the 
new duties of the Constitutional Convention he 
wrote to Mr. Norton May 6, 1867 : — 

" You cannot imagine how I grieve over my lost 
summer — lost before the frosts are gone. But 
when I was urged to let my name be used, I thought 
it all over carefully, and concluded that I ought not 
to decline. It will be a very long and very arduous 
work, but I shall be deeply interested in much of 
it, and in all the novelty of a deliberative assem- 
bly. I have been reading the debates of the con- 
vention of '46. They are endless and mortally 
dull. All this in dog-days too." 

Nor did actual experience cure him of his origi- 
nal distaste. He wrote in July : — 

" Ah, if I could run out of this business I think 
I should feel as if I had had enough of it. I do 
not perceive an attraction toward public life strong 
enough to make the tremendous domestic sacrifice 
which is necessary, and I think that I shall stay 
at home next winter that I may become acquainted 
with my family." 

Yet Mr. Curtis worked faithfully and intelli- 



FOUR YEARS OF POLITICS, 195 

gently In the convention, and held a prominent 
place In a body which Included many eminent men, 
— among them Mr. William M. Evarts, afterwards 
Secretary of State and Senator, and at the time 
the most brilliant and scholarly lawyer of the 
State ; Mr. Charles J. Folger, afterwards Chief 
Justice of the Court of Appeals and Secretary of 
the Treasury; Mr. William A. Wheeler, subse- 
quently Vice-President ; Mr. Greeley and Mr. S. J. 
TUden. He was made Chairman of the Committee 
on Education and Funds relating thereto, and 
member of several other committees. His own 
committee recommended the abolition of the Board 
of Regents, of which he was a member, and which 
was at the time almost a perfunctory body, and the 
creation of the Board of Education, with a single 
executive officer. This plan was not adopted. He 
advocated the appointment of the attorney-general 
and of other state officers, then and still elected^ 
and he maintained that in this way the authority 
of the people was more rationally and effectu- 
ally maintained than by the numerous elections in 
which the voters exercised no real choice. He op- 
posed the prohibition of the sale of liquor and took 
a very earnest part in the debate on the government 
of municipalities, supporting the authority of the 
State over the general police system and condemn- 
ing the theory of local control. In general his 
ideas were those that might have been expected 
from a convinced Democrat with an Intellectual 
sympathy with Hamilton rather than with Jef- 
ferson. 



196 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

On one subject, however, he was very radically 
democratic. He was the most conspicuous and by 
far the most competent of the advocates of the suf- 
frage for women, and on his own proposition for 
an amendment in that sense, he made a speech 
more elaborate and brilliant than any other of his 
in the convention. His advocacy was wholly un- 
availing in affecting the action of the convention, 
but one can hardly read the debates without feeling 
that none of his opponents met him on his own 
ground and that none were able to defend their 
own ground against his logic, which was never 
more penetrating and alert. In fact not since his 
first assault on slavery and its consequences in 
American politics had Mr. Curtis entered a fight 
with more complete conviction, with greater ardor, 
with more careful equipment or a bearing, always 
within the limit of courtesy, more defiant. 

The basis of his argument was the American 
principle of equality of rights, the principle which 
he had so ardently adopted in the anti-slavery con- 
flict, and his challenge was to those who with ref- 
erence to the rights of men held that principle as 
openly and firmly as he held it, to show with what 
justice women could be excluded from its advan- 
tages. The vote he believed to be the natural and 
necessary weapon by which the possessors of equal 
rights could defend them, and the inevitable con- 
dition not only to their defense, but to their intelli- 
gent and wholesome and safe exercise. But while 
he maintained this fundamental principle as the 



FOUR YEARS OF POLITICS. 197 

ground on which the representatives of all the 
people of the State must stand in framing the Con- 
stitution, he did not shrink from the argument of 
expediency. And in meeting this argument he 
sustained a running debate with his opponents, the 
record of which enlivens the reports of the conven- 
tion, otherwise " endless and mortally dull " as he 
found those of 1846 to be. It was not difficult for 
him to match every objection of mere expediency 
presented by the other side with instances of classes 
of males to whom the objection was equally telling 
if not more so. 

The argument that when the great body of wo- 
men want to vote, as they have gradually come to 
want the right to their own inherited or acquired 
property, to an equal authority over their children, 
and similar rights, they would get that right as they 
had got these, inspired Mr. Curtis with indignation 
and scorn, and he hotly resented delay on such a 
pretext as a stupid wrong to the women who al- 
ready desired that right. But that argument, or the 
disposition for which it gave a convenient excuse, 
prevailed in the convention, as doubtless he ex- 
pected that it would. He had, however, the conso- 
lation of believing that his course in the convention 
may have served to hasten the day when this to 
him, absurdly unfair, illogical condition precedent 
should be complied with. Certainly that consider- 
able body of educated and intelligent women who 
feel, and who are acknowledged to be, entirely 
fitted for a share in the political action of the com- 



198 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

munity of which they are honored and useful mem- 
bers must have recognized that no more gallant or 
accomplished champion ever bore their colors. 

The Constitutional Convention came to an end 
early in 1868, and Mr. Curtis returned to his ordi- 
nary pursuits with a sense of profound relief as 
to the past and with a new vigor, but not without 
anxiety as to the immediate future. The Repub- 
lican party was going through its troubles with 
President Johnson, whose impeachment trial closed 
in that year. Mr. Curtis fully appreciated the 
dangers and evils of the stubborn Tennesseean's 
course, and warmly supported the authority of 
Congress to determine the policy of the government 
in the difficult matter of reconstruction, but he was 
indignant at the wanton abuse visited on the Sena- 
tors who voted "not guilty," and firmly upheld their 
fidelity to their oath as they understood it. "Of 
course," he wrote to his friend Mr. Pinkerton, " if 
a man thinks that an oath to decide in a specific 
case according to the evidence is an oath to be 
bound by party dictation, very well. I differ, but 
I do not quarrel. So if a man thinks a Senator 
bought, let him say so, provided he can bring his 
proof. But to say that a Senator who thinks his 
oath means what it states and who acts accordingly 
is infamous, is not criticism ; it is an effort to de- 
stroy liberty of thought and speech by terrorism." 
"I think," he added, "as it happens, although I 
should have voted to convict, that the party is in- 
finitely stronger and surer of success since the fail- 



FOUR YEARS OF POLITICS. 199 

ure of impeachment. I feared a few weets ago 
that we were to be saved by the folly of our foes. 
But I see now that we have the conscience as well 
as the ardor of youth." 

The general action of the strong Republican ma- 
jority in the Senate during Johnson's term, even 
the impeachment plan, had met with Mr. Curtis's 
approval ; but he watched with the keenest solici- 
tude one phase of the contest, that relating to ap- 
pointments. The power of the Senate to give or 
to refuse its " advice and consent " to nominations 
was now used as a weapon against the President, 
and in the heat and stress of the struggle, it was 
inevitable that serious abuses of that power should 
be overlooked, or excused, or even justified. As 
a matter of fact the abuses were numerous and 
flagrant, and it was during Johnson's term that the 
mischievous rule known as the courtesy of the 
Senate took a definite form, and by a series of pre- 
cedents gained an authority that it did not before 
have. This ride in substance was that the action 
of the Senate should practically be decided by the 
Senators (of the majority party) from the State in 
which the office to be filled was, or from which the 
nominee was selected. At this time the majority 
in the Senate gradually resolved themselves into a 
compact and powerful party machine, the avowed 
purpose of which was to protect the party from 
disintegration through the appointment to Federal 
offices of the friends or tools of a hostile President. 
Since patronage was the chief weapon of the Presi- 



200 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

dent, it was natural that his opponents in the Sen- 
ate should seek to turn it aside, and so far as prac- 
ticable to wrest it from his hands. This they 
sought to do by the exercise of the power of con- 
firmation. And since the majority had a common 
party object, since they felt themselves to be, and 
actually were, a sort of party executive committee, 
it was logical for them to apply the methods of 
such an organization, and give to the members 
from each State the disposition of matters relating 
to that State, and to hold them responsible. The 
situation was novel. Party feeling ran very high. 
The sentiment of the North as to questions grow- 
ing out of the war was intense and general, and 
it was on the side of the Senators. The people 
believed and most of the Senators themselves be- 
lieved, that they were fighting for the priceless 
fruits of the victory won in war at " so untold a 
sacrifice." For the first time in the history of the 
party then in power, and for the first time in many 
years, the Senate and the President were pursuing 
opposite aims, and the contest necessarily was most 
bitter, and raged most hotly about the offices, as to 
which the contestants had joint rights. The tac- 
tics and strategy of the Senate were effective, and 
the "courtesy of the Senate" helped greatly to 
make them so. But the rule did not lapse with the 
necessity for it. The power of the Senators of each 
State under the rule was exercised at first, with a 
certain sense of responsibility, because the attention 
of the whole majority in the Senate and of the 



FOUR YEARS OF POLITICS. 201 

party was fixed upon them. But when the contest 
ended with the retirement of Johnson and the 
accession of General Grant, the Senators did not 
lay aside their powers nor abandon the particular 
rule by which these had been distributed. They 
retained them, and the public attention being re- 
laxed they used them with less and less responsi- 
bility and therefore selfishly and to an increasing 
degree corruptly. 

This was an extensive and acute manifestation of 
that malady of the body politic of the American 
democracy which has since received the significant 
and repulsive designation of the " spoils system.'' 
Mr. Curtis, as I have said, regarded it with the 
keenest solicitude, and found in his study of it the 
first strong impulse toward that long struggle for 
the purification of politics which was gradually to 
become the absorbing interest and occupation of 
his life. Unlike many reformers he was thoroughly 
acquainted not only with the evil he contended 
against, but with the system of which it formed a 
part, and with the good as well as the bad in that 
system. He was not a closet politician. He had 
for years steadily and punctually performed the de- 
tailed duties of a party man in his own home ; had 
attended all primary meetings, done duty on party 
committees and in conventions, and had taken his 
share of trouble and responsibility in the distribu- 
tion of offices. Of the party "workers" who in- 
sisted that a party organization could not be kept 
up, or the labor of party contests be secured, were 



202 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

not the offices used as rewards and incentives, there 
were very few who had given to their party the 
time and effort given by him, and certainly there 
was not one of them who had given more with no 
reward whatever, and no desire for any, beyond the 
sense of duty done. Nor was he in the least blind 
to the need of parties or to their value, nor igno- 
rant that they were not composed of saints and could 
not be. He was not even without strong party 
spirit, that is to say, that intent sympathy with those 
who are working to a common end, pride in achieve- 
ment, and the ''delight of battle." If there was 
ever a " loyal " Republican, as the phrase goes, he 
was one. He was as far from being a mere theo- 
rist or fanatic in politics as he was from being 
a self-seeker. He was in fact a party leader of 
shrewdness and tact and knowledge of men, their 
prejudices and weaknesses as well as their virtues. 
He saw in the system that based party power on 
patronage not only its vileness and its corrupting 
tendency,, but its stupidity. His faith in human 
nature and his observation and experience proved 
to him that this system was an unsound basis that 
must crumble from the rottenness of its material. 

In 1868 Mr. Curtis was an elector on the Repub- 
lican ticket, and cast his vote for General Grant, in 
whom he had much confidence. During the next 
spring and summer he delivered lectures at Cornell 
University, in which he felt a keen interest. Of 
one of these lectures he writes : — 

" I have written a lecture upon American Litera- 



FOUR YEARS OF POLITICS, 203 

ture to the effect that what we have belongs to 
the great English stock, as Ovid was a Roman, 
though upon the Euxine, and Theocritus a Greek, 
though a Sicilian. The undertone is friendliness 
for England." 

In 1869, on the death of Henry J. Raymond, the 
founder of the New York " Times," Mr. Curtis re- 
ceived a proposition to take Mr. Raymond's place. 
He felt that the offer was "flattering," — which it 
was not exactly, since Mr. Curtis's reputation was 
on a level, at least, as high as that of the paper, — 
and he felt also that it was an opportunity for a 
more direct if not more extended influence on pub- 
lic opinion. But he declined, and wisely. The con- 
ditions of his work on " Harper's Weekly" were, 
as I have said, peculiarly happy. It would have 
been difficult, if not impracticable, to establish the 
same in a paper like the " Times." 

About this time, certain articles by Mr. Samuel 
Bowles, in the Springfield " Republican," having ex- 
cited the sharp disapproval of the party press, Mr. 
Curtis wrote, in the Weekly : " The more deeply 
an independent journal sympathizes with the prin- 
ciples and purposes of a party, the more strenuously 
will it censure its follies and errors, the more 
bravely will it criticise its candidates and leaders 
for the purpose of keeping the principle pure and 
of making the success of the party a real blessing." 
This was a doctrine which he had already had to 
apply, and which he maintained to the end. 

In September, 1869, Mr. Curtis was nominated 



204 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

for the office of Secretary of State by the Con- 
vention of the Republican party. He declined the 
nomination. It does not come within the plan of 
this Life to follow in detail the political course of 
Mr. Curtis, but the following letter to Mr. Norton 
seems to me to be of peculiar interest, and I give 
it nearly entire : — 

" I have been nominated by acclamation for 
Secretary of State of New York, by the Republi- 
can Convention, to which I did not know that my 
name was to be presented. I opened the paper, 
and I confess the tears were very near my eyes at 
such a spontaneous summons from one of the best 
conventions we have had, and whose platform was 
without evasion, and noble. But upon every account 
it was impossible for me to think of accepting. I 
could not add the official duties to my present 
without breaking down, and I could not reduce my 
present duties without injustice to my family and to 
myself ; and really I have no doubt I am of more 
service as I am than I should be in that office. 
So we hurried down to South Deerfield and I tele- 
graphed the inclosed note to the " Tribune " and the 
" Times," and " Sun," in which for candidly read 
cordially^ — a mistake of the telegraph. I was 
for many reasons very sorry to decline. There is a 
doubt of our success and I knew that I should be 
said to fear a defeat. Then I knew that for any 
candidate, and especially the head of the ticket to de- 
cline, would cloud the prospects of the party. And 
I found that some of the others — say Hillhouse, 



four' YEARS OF POLITICS. 205 

the best of the ticket — had accepted upon condi- 
tion of my running. My position was very difficult, 
but my duty was perfectly clear. It happened as 
I apprehended. The reception of my name, even 
as far as Illinois, was really enthusiastic ; I was 
amazed; I think no man ever had so much favor 
for so small desert. . . . The consequences of my 
declining were in proportion. I have had most 
powerful private and public remonstrances. The 
Washington " Star " said that it is the most remark- 
able case of inconsistency ; that I have always in- 
sisted that every man should do his share, etc. The 
Albany " Evening Journal " insisted that there were 
imperative public reasons that demanded my recon- 
sidering my decision. The Boston "Advertiser" 
said that I had not hitherto shown myself afraid of 
leading a forlorn hope. The Democratic papers 
said that I naturally did not wish to be slaughtered. 
Dorsheimer of Buffalo, who had most warmly sup- 
ported me in the Convention, wrote me a truly pa- 
thetic appeal. But to all my correspondents I re- 
plied that I had not changed, that I had done and 
was still doing my share of political duty, that while 
a man ought to make many sacrifices, in the pres- 
ent condition of our politics, to accept so authori- 
tative and honorable a call, yet there were some 
that he had no right to make, and that the con- 
fidence in his judgment which led his friends to 
nominate him ought to justify to them his decision ; 
that it is a mistake for an editor to take executive 
office ; but as for the forlorn hope, if I had only 



206 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

been sure of being beaten I would gladly have ac- 
cepted. In the midst Hillhouse declined as I had 
feared, and then General Robinson, the next in im- 
portance. The Democrats laughed at the rats run- 
ning from the sinking ship, and at length the new 
nominations were made. General Sigel was put in 
my place and Horace Greeley (!) in that of Hill- 
house. Horace wrote a long letter in accepting, 
and rapped me on the knuckles, in saying that 
he hoped that it would be said of him that he 
never asked his party for an office and never de- 
clined any honorable service to which it called him. 
I should rather have it said of me that I never de- 
clined any such service that I could honorably per- 
form. Of course the party, as a party, must be 
vexed with me in increasing the perils of the can- 
vass — and unfortunately no future convention will 
like to nominate the best of men 'without consulting 
them previously. But still, much as I regret the 
event, it was inevitable, and my conduct was right. 
It spoils, probably, my political career in the ordi- 
nary sense. It seems to me not impossible from 
the reception of my nomination that whether suc- 
cessful or not, I might have been nominated for 
governor next year. But at the bottom of my 
heart I don't want to be. I could n't enter upon 
public official life, and devote myself to a political 
career of that kind, with so much pleasure to myself 
or profit to the country or to the cause, as in other 
ways. So what seems the loss of a great oppor- 
tunity to many of my friends, and to all politicians, 
is not a loss to me but a gain," 



FOUR YEARS OF POLITICS, 207 

Mr. Curtis was to have his experience with con- 
ventions as to the governorship the next year, 
which he also describes in a letter to Mr. Norton. 
The reaction which he expected followed the deci- 
sive Republican successes of 1868, and the party 
was defeated in New York in 1869. Meanwhile 
there had grown up in the State and particularly 
in the city of New York two powerful machines ; 
one, the Republican, with the Federal offices as its 
base of operations, and a hitherto unbroken hold 
of the Legislature; the other, the Democratic, 
of which Tammany was in control, with its base 
in the city offices. There was a certain ill-con- 
cealed connection between the two, growing out of 
these common methods. It was not avowed, nor 
did it extend to all the Republican leaders, but 
there was already in existence the class of politi- 
cians known as " Tammany-Republicans," and they 
largely controlled the organization of the party in 
the city. 

Mr. Curtis wrote to Mr. Norton from Ashfield, 
September 17, 1870, a very full account of the con- 
vention of that year. He had declined to go to 
the convention as a delegate, having special family 
cares at that time which engrossed his attention. 
While at Ashfield, he was urged by the " adminis- 
tration " leaders to attend and act as chairman. 
Feeling that possibly the result in the presidential 
election of 1872 might depend on the course of the 
convention, and knowing that the party was torn 
by the factional disputes of Senators Fenton and 



208 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

Conkling, and that he was personally wholly inde- 
pendent of both, in the hope that he might help to 
unite and concentrate the party, he reluctantly 
accepted. He was chosen chairman by a very 
heavy majority, and his speech was received with 
great enthusiasm. Thereupon one of the Conkling 
managers came to him and asked him to accept 
the nomination for governor. He replied that he 
would not decline it, if the convention offered it, 
though he did not wish it, and he insisted that his 
name should be fairly and honorably presented, if 
at all. His name was presented, but by a local 
politician of New York city, a Tammany Republican 
of very disagreeable associations. The Conkling 
vote was not given him and General Woodford 
was nominated, Mr. Greeley being the third can- 
didate. Apparently, the manager referred to had 
simply used Mr. Curtis to defeat Mr. Greeley. 
That gentleman believed that this purpose was 
known to Mr. Curtis and was indignant accordingly. 
Mr. Curtis was bitterly hurt, for he had consented 
to the use of his name in good faith, not, certainly, 
without legitimate ambition, but with the sincere 
belief that his nomination would be the strongest 
that could be made, and, therefore, the best for the 
party and the cause to which he was devoted. It 
was the first and last time that he trusted his name 
to politicians for use in a convention. I doubt if 
he ever quite understood the exact trick that had 
had been played upon him. It was not easy for 
him to believe others capable of what was morally 



FOUR YEARS OF POLITICS. 209 

impossible for him. But the trick was not so hurt- 
ful to him as it was unworthy in its authors. It 
left him more firmly established in his editorial 
chair and free for the work of reform that was just 
opening before him. Had he been nominated and 
elected governor of New York, he would have 
given up his editor's chair — both the " Easy," 
and the other — and the current of his life 
would have been turned, not, I think, more fortu- 
nately. 

I turn back a little in my narrative to pick up a 
few letters to James Eussell Lowell. Here is one 
apropos of an invitation to a dinner in his honor 
conveyed by Lowell and Mr. Emerson and Dr. 
Holmes as a '' committee " and in a severely formal 
manner : — 

North Shore, Staten Isiand, 15th April, 1869. 
My dear Lowell, — As I had received and an- 
swered Emerson's letter I treated yours as a strictly 
private one, viewing you in the light of a friend 
and not of a committee-man. In that view I confide 
to you that the possibility of a speech, or remarks, 
or a few observations, or a brief and pertinent 
rejoinder, or a felicitous off-hand, etc. etc., fills 
me with dismay, and already affects my appetite. 
But you are too civilized for all that, I know. 
What if I bring two or three old lectures to pre- 
pare for any contingency ? 

Yours always in speechless sympathy, 

G. W. C. 



210 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

The following refers to a few days spent with 
Lowell at Cornell University : — 

North Shobe, Staten Islaio), N. Y., 
10th June, 1869. 

My deak Jamie, — Your note and book and that 
masterly account current with its balance, came 
safely yesterday ; and I have the photos of Ithaca 
which I knew you would leave behind, and which 
I will send to you by E. or by somebody going 
your way. 

After you left came also Mr. Spencer with a 
dozen of those grim cards for you to autograph, 
and with a view in the Enfield ravine for you. 
I have been homesick for you ever since we parted, 
for you were Ithaca to me ; and I am amused by 
hearing people say, " O my ! I had no idea it was 
such a pleasant place." Already I look back upon 
it with the feeling that I have for the dearest old 
Italian days. I was an unhappy wanderer after 
you left, that Friday morning ; and when the cook 
came to the surface to say '' God bless you," and 
the little Mary stood half crying, and the Reverend 
Phoenix presented arms, as it were, at the door, 
and they all said, " How good you and Mr. Lowell 
are," — I was so glad to have my name mingled 
affectionately with yours, that I waved my lily 
hand to them like a conqueror. 

Good-by, my dearest Jamie, and with the sin- 
cerest regards to your wife, I am 

Affectionately yours, 

G. W. C. 



FOUR YEARS OF POLITICS. 211 

And here is one acknowledging a Christmas gift 
of " The Cathedral " from its author. The " big 
house " referred to was the residence of the Shaws 
next to his own home on Staten Island : — 

North Shore, Staten Island, 
29th December, 1869. 

My dear James, — It is a fortunate man who 
can give to his friends as a Christmas box a 
Cathedral of his own building, — I had already 
begun to know it. On the last night at the " big 
house " we all passed through it, I leading, and it 
left us all in the best and noblest of Christmas 
tempers, as it will for many and for many, when 
you and I hear Christmas bells no more. I had 
just read Tennyson's '^ Holy Grail," and I said " it 
is afternoon with him." But with you, my dear 
James, it is a richer morning hour than ever. 

They have left the big house. They have 
laughingly cut the throat of one of the most beauti- 
ful homes, consecrated and endeared by all that 
makes home precious, where the girls were all 
married and their first children all born, from 
which Rob and Charlie went to be killed — in 
which we have all been so happy and so sad, — and 
all this to have a little smaller house and to look 
upon the water ! Of course it is wholly a matter of 
temperament, of sentiment. But that is only to 
say that it concerns what most enriches life. I look 
over and pity the great, silent, gloomy, deserted 
house. Why should it be treated so ? 



212 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

We are all well and send you our truest love, 
and I am always 

Your most affectionate, 

G. W. C. 

In a note to Mr. Norton, he refers to the winter 
of 1869 and 1870, the first one devoted to the ad- 
vocacy of civil service reform in the Lyceum : — 

North Shore, May 3, '70. 
My winter was very busy indeed, but very pleas- 
ant. James Sturgis is in Mt. Vernon Street in 
Boston and I began with a month with him. I had 
only Saturday evening and Sunday for friendship. 
I dined at the Club, at Sebastian Schlesinger's 
(with Music), at Judge Gray's ; and Tom Apple- 
ton gave me one of the most perfect conceivable 
dinners, Agassiz, Longfellow, Lowell, and Richard 
Dana, Jr., the guests. How I wanted you ! I 
heard some of the good concerts, every day wagged 
the pen and every night the tongue, going as far as 
Portland. My lecture was the Civil Service paper 
that I wrote for the Social Science meeting, and al- 
though a grave and earnest plea, was, I think, very 
acceptable, although as half of the Lyceum audi- 
ence are women there could not be the universal 
interest which is, after all, essential to a lecture. 
I delivered it in Baltimore — a city that I detest 
ever since the slaughter of 1861, and to an immense 
audience in the Philadelphia Academy of Music. 

And here is a glimpse of his reception at Vassar 
College, whither he went with some misgivings : — 



FOUR YEARS OF POLITICS. 213 

" Since my lectures ended, I have written an 
address for the young women of Vassar College, 
where I went on Friday last, and to one of the 
most unique occasions of my whole life. The build- 
ing is like the Tuileries. There are about four 
hundred students ; and an aspect of healthfulness, 
intelligence and refinement, with the elegance and 
comfort of the college appointments and accommo- 
dations, leaves the most delightful and cheerful im- 
pression. As you know, the spirit of the College 
is far from that of the ' Woman's Eights ' move- 
ment, at least among the trustees and many of the 
professors, but I pleaded for perfect equality of 
opportunity and liberty of choice, and I was never 
so cordially thanked, even by those, like the Presi- 
dent, who I thought might regret my coming. 

Maria Mitchell, the astronomer, was most ardent 
in her expressions. Several noble looking girls, 
who would not tell their names, came up to me 
at the reception afterwards, and asked to take my 
hand. I felt more than ever how deeply the best 
women are becoming interested. Next week I am 
to speak at the Anniversary of the Woman's Suf- 
frage Association, and that, I believe, is my last 
public appearance for the present." 

The following notes from letters to Mr. Norton 
give some of Mr. Curtis's personal impressions of 
the current phases of politics : — 

June 26, 1870. 

I think the warmest friends of Grant feel that 
he has failed terribly as president — not from 



214 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

* 

want of honesty or desire, but from want oi tact and 
great ignorance. It is a political position, and he 
knew nothing of politics — and rather despised them. 
Then the crisis was most compound. The special 
ends of the party were achieved. The reaction was 
inevitable and should have been expected and en- 
countered. But we have drifted into it without 
care. Upon no single subject have we been agreed. 
We have had no policy, have raised no issues. 
Grant has been headstrong about San Domingo, and 
the Cuban matter has been un skillfully managed, 
although the position was correct. In losing Hoar 
we lose by far the ablest man in the administration. 
Nobody that I see knows why he went. The Senate 
would not make him Judge of the Supreme Court, 
as if such men were to be had for the asking, and 
his place in the Cabinet is taken by an unknown 
ex-rebel from Georgia. Is it " vindictive " not to 
ask Mr. Toombs to be Secretary of War ? Why 
is it that the good men haven't the courage of 
their convictions. Perfunctory statesmanship is 
my abhorrence. 

July 20, 1870. 
At the last moment Congress refused to allow 
the American registry of foreign ships for carrying 
during the (Franco-German) war as the President 
requested. This is to me very significant, for it 
shows that there is something stronger than party 
cohesion, even under such circumstances as the war 
and the pressing request of the party president. 
Protection must now be considered a vital issue 



4 



FOUR YEARS OF POLITICS. 215 

and immediate, not merely possible and postpon- 
able. 

There is a curious presentiment here of a force 
that was ultimately to divide the Republican party, 
and to produce a rearrangement of politics, in 
which, though not upon that issue, Mr. Curtis was 
to find himself acting with the Democrats. 

New York, March 4, '71. 
It is the very ebb tide upon our side, but Grant 
will be renominated, if he makes no signal blunder 
this year, and it is best that he should be. He in- 
tended for some time (as I knew) to send me to 
England, but relinquished it because he did not 
personally know me — and I had been hostile to 
San Domingo. I was greatly relieved, for I should 
have been sorely perplexed. Oh ! for an hour of 
hot sherry sangaree and you ! ! How our tongues 
would rattle I " 



CHAPTER XVI. 

THE REFORM COMMISSION. 

The day that tlie last-cited letter was written, 
Mr. Curtis received from President Grant a nomi- 
nation as to whicli lie was in no wise " perplexed," 
and from the acceptance of which he had no desire 
to be "relieved." It was the nomination to the 
commission which, under a clause of the Sundry 
Civil Appropriation Act of March 3, 1871, the 
President was authorized to appoint, to inquire 
what rules and regulations for admission to the 
public service, which the President could enforce 
under existing laws, would best promote its effi- 
ciency. The commission, of which Mr. Curtis was 
at once made chairman, consisted of seven mem- 
bers, of whom the others were Messrs. Alexander 
G. Cattell, Joseph Medill, Dawson A. Walker, E. 
B. Elliott, Joseph H. Blackfan, and David C. Cox. 
Mr. Medill and Mr. Curtis were the only members 
without experience in the service, the others being 
actually or formerly connected with the various ex- 
ecutive departments. They were entirely agreed 
as to the evils to be remedied, and substantially so 
as to the remedy to be adopted ; but the heaviest 
labor of the commission fell upon Mr. Curtis, who, 



THE REFORM COMMISSION, 217 

however, received valuable assistance from the other 
members. 

The first report of the commission was submit- 
ted to the President December 18, 1871, after ten 
months of most careful and systematic investiga- 
tion and study. The commissioners were greatly 
indebted to the committee of which Hon. Thomas 
A. Jenckes, of Rhode Island, had been chairman, 
and which had made two very extended and well- 
elaborated reports, the first January 31, 1867, and 
the second May 14, 1868. Mr. Jenckes's com- 
mittee had embodied in these reports not only the 
opinions and testimony of a large number of offi- 
cials in the service of the United States, but de- 
tailed descriptions and discussion of the systems 
of Great Britain, Germany, Prussia, France, and 
China. One of the reports of the English com- 
mission was included complete, with an historical 
sketch, instructions to candidates, and specimen ex- 
amination papers. Edouard Laboulaye's exhaust- 
ive essay on "Education and the Administrative 
System of Probation in Germany " was translated 
for Mr. Jenckes's first report, and our accom- 
plished consul at Paris, Mr. John Bigelow, sup- 
plied an account of the French service. In the 
two reports, therefore, covering some three hun- 
dred closely printed pages, the new commission 
had ready at their hands a rich supply of material 
for the comparative study of our own methods in 
the civil service and those of other countries, vary- 
ing in their resemblance or contrast to our own. 



218 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

Mr. Jenckes had, moreover, made a considerable 
study of both the views and the practice of the 
early Presidents and their chief executive officers, 
which was of great use as showing how widely 
these had been departed from. 

But the aim of Mr. Jenckes had been legislation, 
and legislation of a very radical character. Two 
features of the bill offered with his report were, 
first, that the candidate standing highest in a com- 
petitive examination and probation must be selected, 
and, second, that the Civil Service Conmiissioners 
provided for in the bill should make rules for 
suspension and dismissal from the service after 
trial by themselves on charges. No such sweeping 
legislation could be obtained, even had it been de- 
sirable, and the Curtis commission was limited to 
such a system as could be enforced by the Presi- 
dent under existing laws. But while the work of 
the commission was thus limited, and was osten- 
sibly only the promotion of the efficiency of the 
civil administration, it is safe to say that Mr. Cur- 
tis would not have been called to undertake it, 
and would not have undertaken it, had the need of 
it not been much more urgent and its object much 
wider than was indicated by the terms of the ap- 
propriation bill under which the commission acted. 
The real purpose which enlisted him was the re- 
striction and ultimate abolition of the "spoils sys- 
tem," that is to say, the system by which offices 
were given as the rewards or incentives for service 
rendered to a party or to its leaders or managers. 



THE REFORM COMMISSION. 219 

"In obedience to this system," he declared in 
his report, "the whole machinery of the govern- 
ment is pulled to pieces every four years. Political 
caucuses, primary meetings, and conventions are 
controlled by the promise and expectation of pat- 
ronage. Political candidates for the lowest or 
highest positions are directly or indirectly pledged. 
The pledge is the price of the nomination, and, 
when the election is determined, the pledges must 
be redeemed. The business of the nation, the 
legislation of Congress, the duties of the depart- 
ments, are all subordinated to the distribution of 
what is well called the ' spoils.' No one escapes. 
President, secretaries, senators, representatives, 
are pertinaciously dogged and besought on the one 
hand to appoint and on the other to retain subordi- 
nates. The great officers of the government are 
constrained to become mere office-brokers. Mean- 
time they may have their own hopes, ambitions, 
and designs. They may strive to make their pat- 
ronage secure their private aims. The spectacle is 
as familiar as it is painful and humiliating. We 
accuse no individual. We appeal only to universal 
and deplorable experience. 

"The evil results of the practice may be seen, 
first, in its perversion of the nature of the election 
itself. In a free country an election is intended to 
be, and of right should be, the choice of differing 
policies of administration by the people at the 
polls. It is properly the judgment of the popular 
intelligence upon the case which has been sub- 



220 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

mitted to it during the canvass by tlie ablest and 
most eloquent advocates. But the evil system un- 
der which the country suffers tends to change the 
election from a choice of policies into a contest for 
personal advantage. It is becoming a desperate 
conflict to obtain all the offices, with all their law- 
ful salaries and all their unlawful chances. The 
consequences are unavoidable. The moral tone of 
the country is debased, the national character de- 
teriorates. No country or government can safely 
tolerate such a surely increasing demoralization.'' 

Here, then, was the real aim of Mr. Curtis's 
work, to drive politics out of the civil service and 
to drive patronage out of politics. It was a fight 
for a new emancipation that he had taken up. 
As has been said, the immediate scope of the com- 
mission's work was limited to what could be done 
by the President under existing laws. The first 
restriction imposed by these laws was defined by 
the opinion of the then attorney-general, — that, 
while a class might be determined from whom an 
appointee should be selected, appointment could 
not be confined to the single person standing high- 
est in a competitive examination. This was in ef- 
fect exactly the ground taken by Mr. Curtis from 
the start. The rules were framed to require the 
appointment from the three persons standing high- 
est on the eligible list. The second point of im- 
portance presented was that of removals. Here 
the difficulty was not so much what the law al- 
lowed, — though there was some difference of opin- 



THE REFORM COMMISSION. 221 

ion as to that, — but tlie best mode of exercising 
the power of removal. Many advocates of reform 
thought that tenure for good conduct should be 
the rule and, to secure this, that removals should 
be made only for cause ascertained by a trial and 
declared by an independent tribunal. Mr. Cur- 
tis's report recognized the evil for which this rem- 
edy was proposed, but, it declared, " such fixity of 
tenure tends to great perplexity and inconvenience 
in administration, and the responsible head of a 
branch of the public service may justly complain 
if he has no immediate control of his subordinates. 
The details of official conduct which most perplex 
a smooth and satisfactory administration are al- 
ways obvious to the competent and responsible 
chief, but are not always, or indeed often, of a 
kind to be proved in a court. A discretion of re- 
moval in such cases, if so guarded in its exercise 
that it is not liable to be abused, is most desirable 
in every office." The cause of the trouble was 
political pressure, under which changes were con- 
stantly made simply to give a new band of political 
workers their ''turn." 

" Nothing could be more fatal to a sound service. 
Yet it is not unreasonable that, under a system 
founded upon party patronage, such practices 
should prevail. After Mr. Marcy had said that 
* to the victors belong the spoils of the enemy,' he 
remarked, ' but I never said that the victor should 
plunder his own camp.' Yet that was the logic of 
his principle. The hardest fighter should have the 



222 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

most spoils. There is no logic in equal division 
between him who merely wishes well to the cause 
and him who fights the battle. If influence is to 
appoint, the lesser influence must yield to the 
greater ; and when a man has not been appointed 
by reason of his fitness, he must not ask that he be 
retained on account of his merit. The doctrine of 
rotation in office implies that merit should not be 
considered. It treats the public service as a huge 
soup-house, in which needy citizens are to take 
turns at the tables, and they must not grumble 
when they are told to move on. Plainly, if this 
political pressure for the appointment of a particu- 
lar person could be baffled, the present uncertainty 
of tenure would be corrected. The head of a de- 
partment who should fill the various offices under 
him not with the favorites of certain men, but with 
those who are found qualified, would then have 
none but legitimate reasons for the removal of a 
faithful and efficient officer. Conspiracy and slan- 
der against any individual would then have no 
especial inducement or opportunity, and capacity 
character, and efficiency would secure the same 
tenure as in all other spheres of duty. 

"It seems to us, therefore, more desirable to 
afford this reasonable security of permanence in 
office, by depriving the head of illegitimate motives 
for removal, rather than by providing a fixed ten- 
ure to be disturbed only upon conviction after for- 
mal accusation and trial. There is, indeed, no 
reason for such a tenure, unless it can be shown 



THE REFORM COMMISSION. 223 

from the nature of the system that the power of 
removal is likely to be abused." 

These two points being determined, the rules as 
proposed to the President provided " for the com- 
petitive examination of all applicants, for the ap- 
pointment of those found to be best qualified, for 
entrance at the lowest grade of offices in which 
grading is practicable, for probation, and for pro- 
motion." Great importance was attached by Mr. 
Curtis to the required probation of six months ; 
and, as the most general objection to the reform 
system came from those who said that capacity 
could not be found out by questioning, it is worth 
while to quote the report on this point : " A com- 
petitive examination in general and special know- 
ledge, although it would show certain attainments 
which are indispensable to the proper discharge 
of certain duties, would not necessarily prove the 
faculty of skillfully adapting that knowledge to 
the public service. It is a common remark, that 
a man could answer all the book questions, as they 
are called, and yet prove to be an inefficient officer, 
while one who knew nothing of books might be 
very serviceable. This may sometimes be true; 
but there are intelligent persons enough who have 
also swift, accurate, and thorough business aptitude. 
In a general examination this can be little more 
than inferred ; nothing but practice tests this kind 
of efficiency ; and we therefore provide that, when 
an applicant has satisfied all other examinations, 
his skill in applying his knowledge to the duties of 



224 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

the office shall be proved by a practice of six 
months, and that he shall finally be appointed only 
when he has satisfied this test. Probation, indeed, 
is nothing but the test of those essential qualities 
of an officer which it is often asserted cannot be 
ascertained by examination." 

The rules thus framed were to be applied, it 
may be said in a general way, to all subordinates 
in the service above the grade of laborers, and 
below those appointed with the advice and consent 
of the Senate, excepting postmasters and certain 
persons holding places of trust for whom the ap- 
pointing officer was especially responsible. " In 
submitting these suggestions with the rules which 
we have framed," said the report, "we feel that it 
is not so much we who do it as the intelligent pub- 
lic opinion of the country. There has long been a 
profound conviction that the system of appoint- 
ments to the civil service, upon political consider- 
ation only, is one which reason and experience 
equally show to be fatal to economy of administra- 
tion and to republican institutions. 'All I claim 
upon the subject of your resources,' said Edmund 
Burke a century ago, pleading for reform in 
England, 'is this, that they are not likely to be 
increased by wasting them.' But our system of 
the civil service courts waste. It violates the fun- 
damental principles of thrift and economy ; it fos- 
ters personal and political corruption ; it paralyzes 
legislative honor and vigilance ; it weakens and 
degrades official conduct ; it tempts dangerous am- 



TEE REFORM COMMISSION. 225 

bition; and, by poisoning the springs of moral 
action, it vitiates the character of the people, and 
endangers the national prosperity and permanence. 

"We would not exaggerate the importance of 
the peril, but the constant exposure of official dis- 
honesty, the vast system of political corruption the 
disclosure of which has produced a peaceful revo- 
lution in the city of New York, should suggest to 
every good citizen the possibility of a similar revo- 
lution which might not be peaceful. If by that 
great and organized corruption it had been possi- 
ble — and such a contingency is not improbable — 
to decide a presidential election, and in a manner 
universally believed to be fraudulent, the conse- 
quences would probably have been civil war. If 
such corruption be not stayed, the result is only 
postponed ; and nothing so surely fosters it as a 
system which makes the civil service a party prize, 
and convulses the country every four years with a 
desperate strife for office." 

The President approved the rules submitted in 
December, 1871, and the commission, now known 
as the "Advisory Board," took up the work of 
preparing the detailed regulations, and the group- 
ing of places in the departments at Washington 
and the federal offices at New York. This work 
was completed, and the rules and regulations were 
formally promulgated April 16, 1872. There was 
some friction at first, but from that time until 
March, 1876, the working of the system was con- 
stantly more satisfactory, and the official reports 



226 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

of all the departments successively recognized that 
fact. For a long time under the old system the 
work of the service had practically and necessarily 
been done by a relatively small proportion of the 
employees who had escaped the mischievous influ- 
ence of political pressure because their experience, 
ability, knowledge, and fidelity were absolutely 
indispensable. No responsible appointing officer 
dared to include them in a " clean sweep," for out- 
raged public sentiment would have deprived his 
party of the power to confer or continue political 
patronage. This class took kindly to the new sys- 
tem so soon as it was well understood ; and it is a 
proof both of the soundness of the merit system, 
and of a certain curious virtue in the "average" 
American, that, during the three years that the 
Curtis rules were in force, a very large amount of 
careful and arduous work in enforcing them was 
done by men in the service who received no pay 
and little credit therefor. I shall take up later 
the fate of this first attempt at reform, and return 
now to the current of Mr. Curtis's life apart from 
this task. 



CHAPTER XVII. 

THE GREELEY CANVASS. 

As President Grant's first term drew to a close, 
the country began to show definite signs of the 
breaking up of that strong and fervent party spirit 
which had sustained the Republican candidate in 
the election of 1868. "The party issues of the 
last few years," Mr. Curtis had said in closing 
the Civil Service Commission's report to President 
Grant, " are gradually disappearing. The perilous 
questions of fundamental policy have been deter- 
mined, and the paramount interests of the coun- 
try are now those of administration. Honesty 
and efficiency of administration of the settled na- 
tional policy will now be the chief demand of every 
party." This was true of public sentiment, but 
far from true not only of " every party," but of 
any. It cannot be said that the Republican party, 
which had the power and therefore the responsi- 
bility, had met the demands of public opinion. 
After the firm hand of the President had repressed 
the violent reaction in the South manifested in 
what were known as the " Ku-Klux " disorders, 
the various state governments in that region had 
fallen into the hands of Republicans, supported by 



228 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

the negro vote, and had, almost without exception, 
been badly and corruptly conducted. It was plain 
that the chief effort of the leaders of the majority 
in Congress was, not to secure peace, order, and 
prosperity in the South, but to strengthen the hold 
of the party on the national government. With 
this purpose General Grant had little sympathy, 
and with the means employed to carry it out he 
had none. But he was without experience, and 
without trained capacity in civil affairs. His hands 
were tied by the insidious and half-secret bonds 
which the Senate had woven about the executive 
during the term of Mr. Johnson. Within the 
field where he possessed or asserted independence, 
he was sadly at a loss. His judgment of men, so 
swift and unerring in the choice of his subordi- 
nates in the army, was curiously defective in the 
selection of civil appointees. Hi« Cabinet, after he 
had got rid of Judge Hoar, the attorney-general, 
and General Cox, of the Interior Department, 
was, with the exception of Mr. Hamilton Fish, the 
secretary of state, singularly feeble. Then he had 
given office to many of his military associates, who 
had won his confidence and affection by courage, 
energy, and soldierly loyalty, but who were not to 
be trusted in civil life, and who almost openly held 
that they had a right in peace to get as they could 
a rich reward for service rendered in war. His 
administration had given occasion for many small 
and some serious scandals, and there was a well- 
founded though not very definitely formulated 



THE GREELEY CANVASS. 229 

opinion that the political tone of the Federal gov- 
ernment was being steadily lowered. Besides all 
this, the President's scheme for the annexation of 
San Domingo, and his treatment of Mr. Motley 
and of Senator Sumner, had produced a feeling 
of deep resentment among some of the most able 
leaders of the Republican party. 

In this situation what was known as the Liberal 
Republican movement was started. Mr. Curtis 
was keenly sensitive to the unfortunate tendencies 
against which this movement was ostensibly, and 
for the most part sincerely, an organized protest ; 
but he had a deep distrust of some who were en- 
gaged in it, and great doubt of the practical meas- 
ures to which it would or could lead. He had, 
also, much confidence in the personal purity and 
good faith of the President, and in the essential 
honesty and soundness of the great body of vot- 
ers who made up the Republican party. He used 
the agencies at his command — and they were ex- 
tremely effective — to expose what he was sure was 
wrong in the conduct of public affairs, and to arouse 
the conscience and intelligence of the country to 
correct it. But he knew the power for good as well 
as for ill of party organization and party sentiment ; 
he despised and dreaded the most pronounced and 
apparently the controlling tendencies of the Demo- 
cratic party of the day, which was still the party of 
sympathy with secession, of hatred of the negro, of 
financial repudiation, and, in his own State, the 
party of Tammany and of Tweed ; and, though anx- 



230 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

ious and even disheartened at times, lie could not 
bring himself to cut adrift from the Republican 
party. When the Liberal Republican Convention 
in Cincinnati failed to name, as had been hoped, Mr. 
Charles Francis Adams, — who at the last moment 
had scornfully repudiated a policy of " truck and 
dicker," and had bid his friends " draw him out of 
that crowd," — and had nominated Horace Greeley 
for the Presidency, he wrote to Mr. Norton, June 
30, 1872 : — 

" The political situation is described by saying 
that the Democratic Convention will probably nom- 
inate Horace Greeley by acclamation ! ! The con- 
test will be Grant against the field ; Grant with all 
his faults, — and they are not great, — against 
every kind of Democratic, rebellious, Ku-Klux, dis- 
contented, hopeful, and unreasonable feeling. The 
best sentiment of the opposition is, that both parties 
must be destroyed, and Greeley's election is the 
way to destroy them. This is Schurz's ground, who 
likes Greeley as little as any of us. The argument 
seems to be, first chaos, then cosmos. The 'Na- 
tion ' and the ' Evening Post ' in this dilemma 
take Grant as the least of evils. He has been 
foully slandered, and Sumner's speech was unpar- 
donable. He was bitterly indignant with me, — 
said that my course was inexplicable and inconsis- 
tent, and that I was bringing unspeakable woe 
upon my country. I could only reply, ' Sumner, 
you must learn that other men are as honest as you.' 
This election is the last hope of the Democratic 



THE GREELEY CANVASS. 231 

party to recover power. The South is wild for 
Greeley, but only because his name now means a 
possible Democratic triumph. He excused seces- 
sion, he tried to negotiate at Niagara, he tried to 
bully Mr. Lincoln into buying a peace, he bailed 
Jeff Davis, and the worst Northern Copperheads 
support him. That is enough for the South ; it 
ought to be enough for the country." 

Early in September he wrote again from Ash- 
field (where he had now bought a house and land 
separated by one field only from the house of Mr. 
Norton) : — 

" The reaction against Greeley is already evident. 
Poor Sumner has been forced to fly. I am not 
surprised. I thought and said that the struggle 
of joining the enemies of all that he has ever pur- 
sued or done might be overwhelming, and in Wash- 
ington he was old and sad and weary. It is to me 
a very melancholy campaign ; but, like all others, it 
is very important. I have for myself less and less 
inclination to position. We shall reelect Grant, 
and with the dissolution of the Democratic party 
new combinations will arise." 

The campaign practically culminated with the 
decisive successes of the Republicans in the States 
(Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana) which then had 
elections in October, and closed with the overwhelm- 
ing defeat of the Democratic candidate in Novem- 
ber. In the last days of November Mr. Greeley 
died. Mr. Curtis wrote to Mr. Norton Decem- 
ber 2d : — 



232 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

"Now comes Greeley's death, one of tlie most 
mournfully tragic of events, — heart-break and in- 
sanity; and a great gush of sentimental twaddle 
from all the newspapers ; and, that nothing may be 
wanting to the grotesque pathos, the ' Tribune ' pro- 
poses that the Greeley electors shall vote for Grant ! 

"You will have seen how nobly the President 
stood fast against Cameron in the Philadelphia 
post-office matter. I suppose that there must be 
some fight upon the subject in Congress, and I 
know nobody there, unless it be George Hoar, who 
will conduct our side as it should be managed. 
Garfield is timid, Willard is not strong, and no 
one that I know upon the floor is master of the sub- 
ject. The Cabinet is not friendly, but fortunately 
Grant is tenacious and resolved upon the spirit 
which should govern appointments. I suppose, 
however, that he may not see why good party men 
should not be taken." 

However " tenacious and resolved upon the spirit 
which should govern appointments " the President 
was in December, early in the next year a case 
arose in the New York custom-house in which 
Mr. Curtis thought that that spirit was so far vio- 
lated that he felt that he could not retain the part 
of chairman of the commission. It was in no sense 
a question of personal or official dignity. It was a 
question of departing so seriously from the standard 
which he had publicly adopted as to compromise the 
cause of reform and impair if not destroy his abil- 
ity to promote it. He resigned from the commission 



THE GREELEY CANVASS, 233 

March 27, 1874. After he had reached this deci- 
sion, but before he had acted upon it, he was stricken 
with a serious illness. Within the five previous 
years he had added to his ordinary work, which 
was by no means light, and to the very trying and 
exposing lecturing tours, first the labors of the 
Constitutional Convention, and then those of the 
Civil Service Commission. He wrote to Mr. Nor- 
ton, then in Europe : — 

March 12, 1873. 

My dear Charles, — Anna holds the pen for 
me to thank you for your thoughtful and affection- 
ate letter. It comes from your sick-bed to mine, 
for I have put the last feather on my patient cam- 
el's back, and he is broken down. About four 
weeks ago I came home from a short, hard trip to 
the West, worn out and ill. For a week I fought 
a fever which threatened several bad things, but all 
the bad symptoms have left me except a pudding- 
head and general prostration. I lie on the couch 
most all day, and am ordered to rest absolutely for 
six months. So you will find me when you return 
what you first knew me, — a gentleman of elegant 
and boundless leisure. It is a sorry story, and I 
know you will be pained to hear it. I shall have 
to work much more moderately hereafter, and am 
profoundly mortified to have brought myself to 
this pause. When I am able to move I shall per- 
haps go for a month to John Field's, at Newport, 
who most affectionately urges me. 



234 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

It makes me better to think of your all coming 
home again ; and with most unchanging love to all 
of you, I am your always affectionate, 

G. W. C. 

The half year of rest, if not of absolute rest, 
was taken, and restored him to nearly his usual 
vigor and elasticity. The following winter he gave 
up his lectures. He wrote : — 

28 December, 1873. 
It is my first winter at home for nearly twenty 
years, and, as I am not very busy, except with 
reading, it is in every way delightful. It is pleas- 
ant to have my say upon public affairs with per- 
fect independence, and to feel, as I have occasion 
to know, that it is not without result. I am often 
very sorry for the P [resident,] seldom angry with 
him, and must smile when I • reflect that Reid, 
Jennings, Marble, and young Bennett are the great 
and awful "morning press " of New York! 

The situation in public affairs was extremely 
confused. " In '21," he remarked, " the next step 
could be seen, but now it is wholly hidden." He 
saw, however, what it might ultimately require, 
and he wrote to a correspondent: "The right 
and duty, upon proper occasion, to bolt, are the 
right and duty of being honesk The way to secure 
the nomination of honest men is to refuse to vote 
for those who are not honest." 

Commenting on the financial legislation in the 



THE GREELEY CANVASS. 235 

direction of inflation of the currency, he re- 
marked : " The Republican party, in unquestioned 
possession of the government, has no policy upon 
any of the most pressing questions before the coun- 
try." 

He received the veto by President Grant of the 
Inflation Bill as an act of the highest civic cour- 
age, and one which saved the country from the 
utter demoralization with which the dominant 
party threatened it, but he condemned with plain- 
ness the failure of the President to follow, in his 
administration of the civil service outside of the 
rules of the commission, the principle declared and 
embodied in the rules. The election of a Demo- 
cratic majority in the House of Representatives 
was not unexpected by him. He wrote to Mr. 
Norton on the morrow of the election : — 

November 9, '74. 

Well, my dearest Charles, I am no more sur- 
prised than you. For two years the storm has 
been in the air. How I wish it could have been 
averted ! The result is another of the constant 
proofs of the impracticability of " political men," 
and of the wisdom of babes and sucklings. It 
was meant, and will be interpreted by many, as an 
admonition. It is that, and will be of great service. 
But I do not feel sure of the end. I am disposed 
to think that a party which has been adjudged un- 
equal to the situation will hardly be called to deal 
with it again until the other party has been tried. 



236 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

And as the other party has so great a proportion of 
the dangerous elements of the country in it, I feel, 
not surprised nor disappointed nor regretful, for 
it was inevitable, but I do feel very sober. 

Early in 1874 Charles Sumner died. It is evi- 
dence of the esteem in which Mr. Curtis was held 
that, though a firm and convinced opponent of the 
political movement of which Mr. Siunner was in 
his last years one of the most prominent leaders, 
he was invited by the Legislature of Massachusetts 
to deliver a eulogy upon the Senator, which he did 
(June 9, 1874). It was a very noble address, and 
may be said to mark the opening of a new phase 
of the career of Mr. Curtis as an orator. He had 
now practically abandoned the lectures which he 
had taken up nearly twenty years previous, and 
pursued with a steadfast and self-denying energy, 
upon an object that suggests the labors of Walter 
Scott in his old age. By these, and by his politi- 
cal speeches, he was known and greatly esteemed. 
He was now to undertake a much higher and more 
difficult class of oratory, by which in the next 
twenty years his reputation was greatly to be ex- 
tended, and, as I think, established on a lasting 
foundation. I select from this address a few brief 
passages fairly indicative of the tone of the whole, 
but having an added interest from the light they 
throw on Mr. Curtis's own character and his sub- 
sequent course : — 

" Mr. Sumner knew, as every intelligent man 



THE GREELEY CANVASS, 237 

knows, that from the day when Themistocles led 
the educated Athenians at Salamis to that when 
Von Moltke marshaled the educated Germans 
against France, the sure foundations of states are 
laid in knowledge, not in ignorance, and that every 
sneer at education, at culture, at book-learning, 
which is the recorded wisdom of the experience of 
mankind, is the demagogue's sneer at intelligent 
liberty, inviting national degeneration and ruin. . . . 

" While great political results are to be gained 
by means of great parties, he knew that a party 
which is too blind to see, or too cowardly to ac- 
knowledge, the real issue, — which pursues its ends, 
however noble, by ignoble means, which tolerates 
corruption, which trusts unworthy men, which suf- 
fers the public service to be prostituted to personal 
ends, — defies reason and conscience, and summons 
all honest men to oppose it. . . . 

" During all that tremendous time, on the one 
hand enthusiastically trusted, on the other con- 
temptuously scorned and hated, his heart was that 
of a little child. He said no unworthy word, he 
did no unmanly deed ; dishonor fled his face ; and 
to-day those who so long and so naturally, but so 
wrongfully, believed him their enemy, strew rose- 
mary for remembrance upon his grave. . . . 

" This is the great victory, the great lesson, the 
great legacy of his life, that the fidelity of a public 
man to conscience, not to party, is rewarded with 
the sincerest popular love and confidence. What 
an inspiration to every youth, longing with generous 



238 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

ambition to enter the great arena of the state, that 
he must heed first and always the divine voice in 
his own soul, if he would be sure of the liv- 
ing voices of good fame ! Living, how Sumner 
served us ! and, dying at this moment, how he 
serves us still ! In a time when politics seem 
peculiarly mean and selfish and corrupt, when there 
is a general vague apprehension that the very 
moral foundations of the national character are 
loosened, when good men are painfully anxious to 
know whether the heart of the people is hardened, 
Charles Sumner dies ; and the universality and 
sincerity of sorrow, such as the death of no man 
left living among us could awaken, show how true, 
how sound, how generous, is still the heart of the 
American people. This is the dying service of 
Charles Sumner, a revelation which inspires every 
American to bind his shining example as a frontlet 
between the eyes, and never again to despair of 
the highest and more glorious destiny of his coun- 
try." 



CHAPTER XVIIL 

THE EEACTION — 1874 TO 1876. 

In the autumn of 1874 Mr. Curtis wrote to Mr. 
Norton : " I am invited to deliver the Centennial 
Oration at Concord on the 19th, and I shall ac- 
cept." The Concord celebration was the first of 
the long series commemorating the events of the 
Revolution, and it was Mr. Curtis's peculiar for- 
tune not only to open the series at Concord, but 
to close it with the address at the unveiling of the 
Washington Statue at New York in 1883. The 
Concord oration is noteworthy for the spirited 
review of the story of the day, for its masterly 
tribute to Samuel Adams, and for the succinct and 
impressive statement of the conditions surrounding 
the birth of the Revolution. It was inevitable that 
Mr. Curtis should close by applying the lesson of 
the earlier day to the problems of the later. But 
in doing this he could not conceal the grave anx- 
iety by which he was possessed. His spirit was 
hopeful and courageous, but in the presence of the 
President, whose iron determination and honest 
purpose, sustained by a hold on the affections of 
the people only surpassed by that of Lincoln and 
Washington, had palpably failed to turn back or 



240 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

seriously to stem the tide of political demoraliza- 
tion with which Mr. Curtis was himself struggling, 
the orator's native hope and courage could point to 
no assurance of near progress. The closing words 
of the address were of high and impassioned ex- 
hortation, but they were distinctly sad. 

For in the spring of 1875 it had become plain 
that General Grant had surrendered, and was not 
prepared for the fight whicli must be made if the 
reform of the civil service was even to be main- 
tained within the scope of tbe rules. He sub- 
mitted to Congress, at the opening of the short 
session in December, a recommendation for tbe 
continuance of the appropriation, but in a tone 
that clearly implied that lie would abandon the 
plan if the appropriation were withheld. It was 
refused, and on March 27th the rules were sus- 
pended, and the work of the commissioners came 
to an end. It was, of course, a severe blow to the 
hopes of Mr. Curtis, but it did not shake his in- 
domitable devotion. Very much had been gained. 
The principle of appointment for proved merit had 
been embodied in a definite, working system ; and 
the system had stood admirably the test, not 
merely of experience, but of experience with the 
most bitter and unscrupulous opposition from men 
of influence in public life, with inefficient and ill- 
trained subordinate officers, and with all the diffi- 
culties growing from the looseness and low morals 
of the service. No one could deny that it had 
worked well in exact proportion to the fidelity 



THE REACTION, 24:1 

with which it had been applied. It had been 
proved beyond all cavil that it would secure for 
the government competent persons of a high aver- 
age character. The provision for probation had 
been an entire protection against the possible 
defects of competitive examinations, and these 
defects had been found to be insignificant. In 
practice the appointees standing highest in the 
examinations had, with very few and slight excep- 
tions, passed with equal success the test of proba- 
tion, and had steadily improved in efficiency after 
entering the service. The testimony of the officers 
in authority in the various departments was en- 
tirely favorable, and for the most part heartily 
favorable, as to the effect of the system on the 
service. On the other hand the immense advan- 
tage to them of the relief from worry and waste of 
time in dealing with the office-seekers was gener- 
ally recognized. It was shown beyond all doubt 
that the honest enforcement of the system ex- 
cluded party politics from the service to the great 
gain of both. In short, the three years from 1872 
to 1875 had established the entire soundness of 
the reform, and its complete certainty, when honor- 
ably applied, to do all that its authors had pre- 
dicted, promised, or even hoped. 

It is a natural question, why it was not persisted 
in. The answer may be given in the words of 
Mr. Curtis twelve years later: "It was once my 
duty to say to President Grant that the adverse 
pressure of the Republican party would overpower 



242 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

his purpose of reform. He replied with a smile 
that he was used to pressure. He smiled incredu- 
lously, but he presently abandoned the reform." 
The " adverse pressure of the Republican party " 
was of a kind to which General Grant was in no 
wise used. The pressure of a hostile force upon 
the lines he could meet, for he could have no pos- 
sible desire to yield to it or escape from it. The 
pressure of civilians, when he was in military 
command, he could also resist, for his authority 
was complete, his responsibility was definite and 
exacting, and he knew perfectly what must be the 
consequences if he gave way. He knew, too, that 
if he did not give way the civilians must. But 
the pressure of political friends high in the party 
leadership was a wholly different force. It was at 
once powerful, subtle, unceasing, and indirect. It 
enveloped him like an atmosphere, and was often 
most potent when he was not conscious of it. The 
men who brought this pressure to bear were far 
too shrewd to let him understand their real object, 
or to arouse in him anything like antagonism. 
They came to him as to the titular head of the 
party ; they made him feel that the success of the 
party depended on strong and prudent organiza- 
tion, that this could be effected only by a proper 
distribution of the offices, and that distribution of 
offices by " schoolmasters' examinations " would 
tend to weaken and demoralize the party. They 
presented the party to him in the light of analogy 
to an army, of which he was the chief, they were 



THE REACTION. 243 

the generals, and the place-holders were the subor- 
dinate officers. At every step they showed him 
ease, popularity, success, honor, on the one hand, 
and on the other the barren results of a futile 
effort to carry out a visionary scheme, the only 
practical outcome of which would be to give aid 
and comfort to the enemy. And I do not at all 
deny that many of those through whom this pres- 
sure was exerted were entirely sincere in their 
views, while some of them were unselfish and pa- 
triotic in their motives. They were veterans of 
hard-won victories for the Republican cause in a 
struggle where offices had been freely used to 
build up and maintain the organization, and they 
were convinced that to give up the offices was so 
plainly injurious as to be party treason. The 
questions of the war were settled. The people 
were no longer sharply divided by distinct issues. 
The opponents of the Republican party were stead- 
ily gaining strength. These men felt, and to some 
extent they made President Grant feel, that in such 
a strait, with a doubtful or at least a very diffi- 
cult national campaign coming on, it would be folly 
to reject any resources within reach of the party. 
They could not see, nor could he, that the use of 
the Federal offices as " patronage " or "spoils," as 
the reward and incentive of political effort, was in 
reality throwing away that supreme resource, the 
confidence of intelligent men in the honesty and 
unselfishness of the purposes of a party. Mr. 
Curtis's view was opposed to theirs, and a few 



244 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

brief months was to verify it. " History teaches," 
he said, " no lesson more distinctly than that no- 
thing is so practical as principle, nothing so little 
visionary as honesty. Political movements, like 
all other good causes, are constantly betrayed by 
the ignorance which thinks itself smartness, and 
the contempt of ideas which is practical common 
sense." 

The next year was one of relative quiet for 
Mr. Curtis. He turned to his work on " Harper's 
Weekly " with a sense of relief, on the one hand, 
from the pressure of official responsibility, and on 
the other with renewed determination to educate, 
arouse, and direct public opinion toward the reform 
which had become the chief object of his life in 
public affairs. He enjoyed his tranquil home and 
the fairly settled round of professional duties with 
a deep content. A glimpse of • the family life is 
afforded in the following note to Mr. Lowell, re- 
ferring to the ode read by the author at Concord 
at the Centennial Celebration : 

West New Bkighton, Staten Island, N. Y,, 
17th May, 1875. 

My dear James, — I read and then re-read 
your ode last evening to the assembled family, and 
I cannot tell you how fine, how superb, it seems to 
all of us. It is full of the noblest thought, — of 
the loftiest melody. The dance of a thousand rills 
is in it, and the murmur of old woods. If you 
have ever done anything more satisfactory I don't 
know it. 



THE REACTION. 245 

This line is only to say that I can't say any- 
thing but to tell you that all who love liberty will 
love it and you the more for this glorious strain. 
We are all well, and all send you our love. 
Your most affectionate 

G. W. C. 

In a letter to Mr. Norton, alluding to a week in 
Washington, there is a note of the really moment- 
ous election that was approaching : — 

28th February, 1876. 

I returned Friday from Washington, where I 
had passed a week with the Bancrofts. Nothing 
could surpass their kindness. From the moment I 
came until that which saw me off, I was passed 
along from one interest and pleasure to another, 
seeing and hearing all that is most desirable in 
Washington. I think the most extraordinary 
thing I learned was that, a little while ago, Sam 
Ward (California and lobby Sam) had the whole 
Supreme Court of the United States — Chief Jus- 
tice and all — to dine with him at Welcker's on a 
Sunday afternoon ! 

/ dined at the secretary of state's with Fer- 
nando Wood, handing out Mrs. Fish to dinner. 

All that I saw and heard of Bristow, whom I 
knew four years ago in Washington, was good and 
satisfactory. I asked Jewell, at the attorney-gen- 
eral's table, whom the party — not the managers 
— would make the candidate, and he answered in- 
stantly, " Bristow." 



246 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

Mr. Benjamin H. Bristow, as secretary of the 
treasury, had won the esteem and confidence of the 
best men of the Republican party by the energy 
and simple fidelity with which he had undertaken 
to prosecute extensive frauds on the internal rev- 
enue, known as the "whiskey frauds." He was a 
native of Kentucky, had served honorably in the 
Union army, and had taken an earnest interest in 
the reform of the civil service. In the followino: 
summer Mr. Curtis was elected a delegate to the 
Republican National Convention, and supported 
the nomination of Mr. Bristow, though he finally 
voted for that of Mr. Rutherford B. Hayes, lead- 
ing the opposition to Senator Conkling, who then 
represented the administration element in the 
party in the State of New York. It is not neces- 
sary here to recite the situation in which the elec- 
tion left the country. It is sufficient to say that 
the electoral votes of South Carolina, Florida, and 
Louisiana, and a part of those of Oregon, were in 
dispute ; that a single one of these votes given to 
Mr. Tilden, the Democratic candidate, would have 
been sufficient to elect him ; that there were two 
sets of electoral votes from these States sent to 
Washington; that the House of Representatives 
had a Democratic majority, the Senate a Repub- 
lican majority ; that the votes were to be opened 
by the President of the Senate and counted in the 
presence of both houses. The Republican claim 
was, that the President of the Senate could decide 
which votes should be opened and submitted ; the 



THE REACTION. 247 

Democratic claim was, that all votes must be 
opened and submitted, and the choice made as to 
disputed votes by each house, the assent of both 
being necessary to an election. The former course 
would have given the election to Mr. Hayes, the 
latter to Mr. Tilden. The country was in a state 
of the deepest confusion. Party feeling ran very 
high. The passions of the war were reawakened, 
and the dread possibility of civil strife was oppress- 
ing or exciting the minds of all. 

At the very height of the struggle, and before 
any peaceful solution of it had been even plausibly 
argued, Mr. Curtis was called upon to speak at the 
dinner of the New England Society of New York 
on the 22d of December. He had chosen as his 
toast " The Puritan Principle : Liberty under the 
Law." His speech was a brief one, and it was 
so complete an example of the spirit in which he 
met every occasion, and plucked from its heart 
the deepest meaning, that I shall quote (from the 
society's report) the latter half of it : — 

''Do you ask me, then, what is this Puritan 
principle ? Do you ask me whether it is as good 
for to-day as for yesterday; whether it is good 
for every national emergency ; whether it is good 
for the situation of this hour? I think we need 
neither doubt nor fear. The Puritan principle in 
its essence is simply individual freedom. From 
that spring religious liberty and political equality. 
The free state, the free church, the free school, — 
these are the triple armor of American nationality, 



248 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

of American security. But the Pilgrims, while 
they have stood above all men for this idea of lib- 
erty, have always asserted liberty under law^ and 
never separated it from law. John Kobinson, in 
the letter that he wrote the Pilgrims when they 
sailed, said these words, that well, sir, might be 
written in gold around the cornice of that future 
banqueting hall to which you have alluded : ' You 
know that the image of the Lord's dignity and 
authority which the magistry beareth is honor- 
able in how mean person soever.' (Applause.) 
This is the Puritan principle. Those men stood 
for liberty under the law. They had tossed long 
upon a wintry sea ; their minds were full of images 
derived from their voyage ; they knew that the will 
of the people alone is but a gale smiting a rudder- 
less and sailless ship, and hurling it, a mass of 
wreck, upon the rocks. But the will of the people 
subject to law is the same gale filling the trim 
canvas of a ship that minds the helm, bearing it 
over yawning and awful abysses of ocean safely to 
port. (Loud applause.) 

" Now, gentlemen, in this country the Puritan 
principle has advanced to this point, that it pro- 
vides a lawful remedy for every emergency that 
may arise. I stand here as a son of New Eng- 
land. In every fibre of my being, I am a child 
of the Pilgrim. The most knightly of all the 
gentlemen at Elizabeth's court said to the young 
poet, when he would write an immortal song, 
'Look into thy heart and write.' And I, sirs and 



THE REACTION, 249 

brothers, if, looking into my own heart at this 
moment, I might dare to think that what I find 
written there is written also upon the heart of 
my mother, clad in her snows at home, her voice 
in this hour would be a message spoken from the 
land of the Pilgrims to the capital of this na- 
tion, — a message like that which Patrick Henry 
sent from Virginia to Massachusetts when he heard 
of Concord and Lexington : ' I am not a Virgin- 
ian, I am an American.' (Great applause.) And 
so, gentlemen, at this hour we are not Republicans, 
we are not Democrats, we are Americans. (Tre- 
mendous applause.) 

" The voice of New England, I believe, going to 
the capital, would be this, that neither is the Re- 
publican Senate to insist upon its exclusive parti- 
san way, nor is the Democratic House to insist 
upon its exclusive partisan way; but Senate and 
House, representing the American people and the 
American people only, in the light of the Constitu- 
tion and by the authority of the law, are to provide 
a way over which a President, be he Republican 
or be he Democrat, shall pass unchallenged to his 
chair. (Vociferous applause, the company rising 
to their feet.) Ah, gentlemen (renewed applause), 
— think not, Mr. President, that I am forgetting 
the occasion or its amenities. (Cries of ' No, no,' 
and ' Go on.') I am remembering the Puritans ; I 
am remembering Plymouth Rock and the virtues 
that made it illustrious. (A voice — 'Justice.') 
But we, gentlemen, are to imitate those virtues, as 



250 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

our toast says, only by being greater than the men 
who stood upon that rock. As this gay and lux- 
urious banquet to their scant and severe fare, 
so must our virtues, to be worthy of them, be 
greater and richer than theirs. And as we are 
three centuries older, so we should be three cen- 
turies wiser than they. Sons of the Pilgrims, you 
are not to level forests, you are not to war with 
savage men and savage beasts, you are not to tame 
a continent nor even found a state. Our task is 
nobler, is diviner. Our task, sir, is to reconcile 
a nation. It is to curb the fury of party spirit. 
It is to introduce a loftier and manlier spirit 
everywhere into our political life. It is to edu- 
cate every boy and every girl, and then to leave 
them perfectly free to go from any school to any 
church. Above all, sir, it is to protect absolutely 
the equal rights of the poorest and the richest, of 
the most ignorant and most intelligent citizen ; and 
it is to stand forth, brethren, as a triple wall of 
brass around our native land against the mad 
blows of violence or the fatal dry-rot of fraud. 
(Loud applause.) And at this moment, sir, the 
grave and austere shades of the forefathers whom 
we invoke bend above us in benediction as they 
call us to this sublime task. This, brothers and 
friends, this is to imitate the virtues of our fore- 
fathers ; this is to make our day as glorious as 
theirs." (Great applause, followed by three 
cheers for the speaker.) 

I have quoted this speech from the New Eng- 



THE REACTION. 251 

land Society's report, and I have included notes of 
the applause, because they give the reader an im- 
pression of the effect of the speech upon an audi- 
ence, which, even after dinner, as those familiar 
with it will concede, is more easily amused than 
stirred. There can be no doubt that the influ- 
ence of the speech was considerable in determining 
the acceptance of the plan of a commission, and of 
the decision of the commission, when reached on the 
eve of the inauguration. It is not easy at this dis- 
tance to conceive the real peril of the situation. 
As I have said, it was the passions of the war that 
were reawakened and intensified. Many Repub- 
licans believed that Mr. Tilden's accession to the 
Presidency meant the loss of all that had been 
gained by the war. Many Democrats, especially 
in the South, believed that Mr. Hayes's accession 
meant the extension to the national government of 
the corruption and greed of the " carpet-bag " re- 
gime in the South. In the absence of an arbitra- 
tion agreed to by both sides, either party would 
have been furious at facing such dangers and 
wrongs as they believed involved, and no President 
with a title depending on a disputed and technical 
interpretation of an obscure statute could have 
faced such fury without grave risks. To have 
contributed in an appreciable degree to the dissi- 
pation of the storm thus threatened is no slight 
claim to the grateful admiration of the country. 
This Mr. Curtis did in a speech of but a few minutes. 
The speech is interesting also because, though it was 



252 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

not unpremeditated, it bears marks of being wholly 
unprepared. In the quiet of his study Mr. Curtis 
would not have written out the slightly confused 
metaphors which, in the fervor of the occasion, 
rushed one upon another, for he was singularly 
careful in the construction of his periods when he 
took time to construct them in advance. These 
traits of the speech, however, only deepen the im- 
pression of the power of the speaker whose un- 
marshaled utterances so deeply moved his hearers, 
and, twenty years later, must still move the reader. 



CHAPTER XIX. 

THE PARTING OF THE WAYS. 

At the outset of Mr. Hayes's administration, 
he sought diligently to connect with it men whose 
names would give it the prestige which his own 
modest career did not supply, and which the cir- 
cumstances of his election tended to make difficult. 
Among others he turned to Mr. Curtis, who wrote 
as follows to Mr. Norton : — 

19th May, 1877. 

When the President was here during the last 
week, Mr. Evarts offered me my choice of the 
chief missions, evidently expecting that I would 
choose the English. 

Putting myself out of the question, would it not 
be equally serviceable to the good cause and the 
administration if it were openly offered to me, and 
declined by me in a way to give the administration 
the credit, and upon the ground, not of shirking 
the public service, but of my preference for my 
present public duty? That is, could not all the 
public advantage be gained by the offer, and would 
not the advantage be greater than the injury to the 
administration of turning to a second choice ? If 
the administration are not willing to have the offer 
known unless I accept, ought I to insist ? 



254 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

Tell me briefly wliat you think, and whether you 
think, in any case, that a man absolutely without 
legal training of any kind could be a proper min- 
ister. I know that you love me, but I confide in 
your perfect candor. Please say nothing of it to 
any one. 

It will be seen that Mr. Curtis was not insensi- 
ble to the attractions of this offer, nor, at first, 
decided to put it aside. But finally he did so, and 
unquestionably chiefly from the motive ascribed in 
Lowell's lines : — 

" At courts, in senates, who so fit to serve ? 
And both invited, but you would not swerve, 
An meaner prizes waiving that you might 
In civic duty spend your heat and light, 
Unpaid, untrammeled, with a sweet disdain 
Refusing posts men grovel to attain." 

This is the poet's way of putting it. I do not 
think that there was in Mr. Curtis's mind a trace 
of " disdain," even of " sweet disdain," for the 
post of representative of his country at a foreign 
court, and particularly at the court of St. James. 
On the contrary, however he might regard the mo- 
tives of some who sought such places, he under- 
stood clearly enough the honor they brought to 
those who honorably filled them. His doubt, as 
his note to Mr. Norton shows, was as to his own 
fitness. He might have dismissed that, had his 
modesty permitted him to remember Irving in 
Spain, Bancroft in Germany, Motley in England, 
Marsh in Italy. And, since it is Lowell's view I 



THE PARTING OF THE WA YS. 255 

am talking of, I cannot but picture to myself the 
impression our English friends would have had 
of the American representative, and particularly 
of the American " occasional " speaker, had they 
been permitted to hear and know first Curtis and 
then Lowell. It is a pleasing fancy, but it is not 
necessary to develop it. Mr. Curtis saw his " civic 
duty " at home, and felt that here better than else- 
where he could do what was worth trying to do. 
He wrote to Mr. Norton (May 28, 1877), who 
had sought to change his decision : — 

" I am truly obliged to you for your letter. I 
knew it would be hard to satisfy (fortify ?) myself 
against it, but I have done so, and I shall show you 
that I do wisely and therefore right in declining." 

And in July he wrote to Mr. Lowell, just ap- 
pointed minister to Spain : — 

ASHFIELD, July 9, 1877. 

My dear James, — I must not let you go with- 
out a word of love and farewell, although I have 
meant to write you a letter. I told Charles that 
on every ground, except that you go away, I am 
delighted that you are going. With me the case 
is very different. I happen to be just in the posi- 
tion where I can be of infinitely greater service to 
the good old cause, and to the administration that 
is meaning and trying to advance it, than I could 
possibly be abroad. Evarts wrote me that he felt 
just as I did about it. But, unless there was some 
overpowering private reason, you could not escape 
going, and nothing has done this administration 



256 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

more good, nor rejoiced so many hearts,"as your ap- 
pointment. You will be blown on to your castles 
in Spain by a whirlwind of benedictions. 

Anna sends ber love, and I beg my most friendly 
remembrance to your wife, and I am always most 

Affectionately yours, 

G. W. C. 

Mr. Curtis recognized the sincere purpose of the 
President to do all that he could to raise the level 
of the civil service, and with it the level of Ameri- 
can politics. A new Civil Service Commission 
was appointed, with Mr. Dorman B. Eaton at its 
head ; and the rules formulated under Mr. Curtis 
were applied with a measure of thoroughness at 
Washington, especially in the Department of the 
Interior under the Hon. Carl Schurz, in the cus- 
tom-house in New York, and in the post-office, 
then placed in charge of Hon. Thomas L. James. 
Mr. Curtis rejoiced at these evidences of progress 
in the reform, and warmly supported Mr. Hayes. 
The President needed support. He had deeply 
offended the Republican leaders, who had been 
in practically unrestrained power under President 
Grant, by the very policy which won for him the 
confidence and respect of Mr. Curtis. He had 
made a definite stand, which, if it was not abso- 
lutely unyielding, was, in all the circumstances, a 
very firm and honorable one, against the spoils 
system, and necessarily against the claims of the 
Senators, whose political influence was almost 



THE PARTING OF THE WAYS. 257 

wholly due to their control of the distribution of 
the spoils. Chief among these was Senator Roscoe 
Conkling, of New York, with whom, as the politi- 
cal leader in his own State, Mr. Curtis had been 
intimately, though by no means always amicably, 
related. At the approach of the fall election, 
Mr. Curtis was a delegate to the Republican State 
Convention, which was in the control of the Conk- 
ling faction. He supported in the convention a 
resolution approving the course of the administra- 
tion, and particularly its course with reference to 
the civil service. From the point of view of the 
most ordinary political sagacity, the resolution was 
not only just but proper. To refuse to adopt it 
was to discredit the party in the approaching con- 
test, and to commit the most unpardonable sin in 
the partisan decalogue, — that of placing a weapon 
in the hands of " the enemy." Had the resolution 
been untruthful, had it approved efforts at reform 
that had never been made, and " recognized " a 
virtue in the national administration that did not 
exist, it would have encountered no opposition from 
the Conkling side. As it was, Mr. Conkling not 
only opposed it, but he indulged in a curiously 
bitter and vulgar attack on Mr. Curtis personally. 
Replying to a note from Mr. Norton, regarding 
this incident, Mr. Curtis wrote : — 

AsHFiELD, 30th September, 77. 

My dearest Charles, — Your note is here, 
and it is lucky that you are not, for I should do no 



258 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

work. It was the saddest sight I ever knew, that 
man glaring at me in a fury of hate, and storming 
out his foolish blackguardism. I was all pity. I 
had not thought him great, but I had not suspected 
how small he was. His friends, the best, were con- 
founded. One of them said to me next day, ''It 
was not amazement that I felt, but consternation." 
I spoke offhand, and the report is horrible. The 
agent of the Associated Press came to me and 
apologized. Conkling's speech was carefully writ- 
ten out, and therefore you do not get all the venom, 
and no one can imagine the Mephistophelean leer 
and spite. I have many letters. Oh dear! how 
much I prefer these quiet hills, and how I am 
driven out on the stormy seas ! 

Mr. Curtis was indeed constantly " driven out on 
the stormy seas," but the force that drove him was 
from within, not from without. He went where 
there was danger to the cause of good government, 
following Sidney's exhortation to a younger bro- 
ther : '' Whenever you hear of a good war, go to 
it." I quote here some passages from his address 
in this same year to the students of Union College 
on " The Public Duty of Educated Men." They 
will show by what principles he believed himself 
to be guided, and will throw light on his subsequent 
course : — 

" By the words ' public duty ' I do not necessarily 
mean official duty, though it may include that. I 
mean simply that constant and active practical par- 



THE PARTING OF THE WAYS. 259 

ticipation In the details of politics without which, 
upon the part of the most intelligent citizens, the 
conduct of public affairs falls under the control of 
selfish and ignorant or crafty and venal men. I 
mean that personal attention which, as it must be 
incessant, is often wearisome and even repulsive, to 
the details of politics — attendance upon meetings, 
service upon committees, care and trouble and ex- 
pense of many kinds, patient endurance of rebuffs, 
chagrins, ridicules, disappointment, defeats ; in a 
word, all those duties and services which, when self- 
ishly and meanly performed, stigmatize a man as a 
mere politician, but whose constant, honorable, in- 
telligent, and vigilant performance is the gradual 
building, stone by stone and layer by layer, of that 
great temple of self-restrained liberty which all 
generous souls mean that our government shall 
be. . . . 

'' Undoubtedly a practical and active interest in 
politics will lead you to party association and coop- 
eration. Great public results — the repeal of the 
corn laws in England, the abolition of slavery in 
America — are due to that organization of effort, 
that concentration of aim, which arouse, instruct, 
and inspire the popular heart and will. This is 
the spring of party, and those who seek practical 
results instinctively turn to this agency of united 
action. But in this tendency, useful in the state 
as the fire upon the household hearth, lurks, as in 
that fire, the deadliest peril. Here is our re- 
public : it is a ship, with towering canvas spread, 



260 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

sweeping before a prosperous gale over a foaming 
and sparkling sea ; it is a lightning train darting 
with awful speed along the edges of dizzy abysses 
and across bridges that quiver over unsounded 
gulfs. Because we are Americans we have no 
peculiar charm, no magic spell, to stay the eternal 
laws. Our safety lies alone in cool self-possession, 
directing the forces of wind and wave and fire. If 
once the madness to which the excitement tends 
escapes control, the catastrophe is inevitable. And 
so deep is the conviction that sooner or later this 
madness must seize every republic, that the most 
plausible suspicion of the permanence of the Amer- 
ican government is founded in the belief that party 
spirit cannot be restrained. It is, indeed, a master 
passion, but its control is the true conservatism of 
the republic, and of happy human progress ; and 
it is men made familiar by education with the 
history of its ghastly catastrophes, men with the 
proud courage of independence, who are to temper, 
by lofty action born of that knowledge, the fero- 
city of party spirit. 

"This spirit adds moral coercion to sophistry. 
It denounces as a traitor him who protests against 
party tyranny, and it makes unflinching adherence 
to what is called regular party action the condition 
of the gratification of honorable political ambition. 
Because a man who sympathizes with the party 
aims refuses to vote for a thief, this spirit scorns 
him as a ' rat ' and a renegade. Because he holds 
to principle and law against party expediency and 



THE PARTING OF THE WAYS, 261 

dictation, he is proclaimed as the betrayer of his 
country, justice, and humanity. Because he tran- 
quilly insists upon deciding for himself when he 
must dissent from his party, he is reviled as a pop- 
injay and a visionary fool. Seeking with honest 
purpose only the welfare of his country, the hot air 
around him teems with the cry of the ' grand old 
party,' ' the traditions of the party,' ' loyalty to the 
party,' ' future of the party,' ' servant of the party ; ' 
and he sees and hears the gorged and portly money- 
changers in the temple usurping the very divinity 
of the God. Young hearts ! be not dismayed. If 
ever one of you shall be the man so denounced, do 
not forget that your own individual convictions are 
the whip of small cords which God has put into 
your hands to expel the blasphemers." 

Mr. Curtis was approaching the parting of the 
ways. There was no doubt, when the time came, as 
to what guide he would follow. 



CHAPTER XX. 

POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE. 

On the 17th of October, 1877, Mr. Curtis 
delivered the oration at Schuylerville, Saratoga 
County, New York, on the hundredth anniversary 
of the surrender of Burgoyne. As he said : " The 
drama of the Revolution opened in New England, 
culminated in New York, and closed in Virginia." 
It was the culmination that was celebrated on the 
battle-field where, for the first time in the long and 
fluctuating struggle, the American forces met and 
defeated in the open field the disciplined army of a 
brave and capable English commander. The story 
of the battle, and of the events that led up to it, is 
admirably told in Mr. Curtis's oration. I cite the 
closing passages, as giving the spirit in which Mr. 
Curtis was wont to apply to the present the les- 
sons of the past : — 

"It is the story of a hundred years ago. It 
has been ceaselessly told by sire to son along this 
valley and through this land. The later attempt 
of the same foe, and the bright day of victory at 
Plattsburg, renewed and confirmed the old hostil- 
ity. Alienation of feeling between the parent 
country and the child became traditional, and on 



POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE. 263 

both sides of the sea a narrow prejudice survives, 
and still sometimes seeks to kindle the embers of 
that wasted fire. But here and now we stand 
upon the grave of old enmities. Hostile breast- 
work and redoubt are softly hidden under grass 
and grain ; shot and shell and every deadly missile 
are long since buried beneath our feet ; and from 
the mouldering dust of mingled f oemen springs all 
the verdure that makes this scene so fair. While 
nature tenderly and swiftly repairs the ravages of 
war, we suffer no hostility to linger in our hearts. 
Two months ago the British Governor-General of 
Canada was invited to meet the President of the 
United States at Bennington, in happy commem- 
oration, not of a British defeat, but of a triumph of 
English liberty. So, upon this famous and deci- 
sive field, let every unworthy feeling perish ! Here 
to the England that we fought let us now, grown 
great and strong with a hundred years, hold out 
the hand of fellowship and peace. Here, where 
the English Burgoyne, in the very moment of his 
bitter humiliation, generously pledged George 
Washington, let us, in our high hour of triumph, 
of power, of hope, pledge the Queen ! Here in the 
grave of brave and unknown foemen may mutual 
jealousies and doubts and animosities lie buried 
forever ! Henceforth, revering their common glo- 
rious traditions, may England and America press 
always forward side by side in noble and aspiring 
rivalry to promote the welfare of man ! 

"Fellow-citizens, with the glory of Burgoyne's 



264 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

surrender, the Revolutionary glory of tlie State of 
New York still fresh in our memories, amid these 
thousands of her sons and daughters whose hearts 
glow with lofty pride, I am glad that the hallowed 
spot on which we stand compels us to remember 
not only the imperial State, but the national com- 
monwealth whose young hands here together struck 
the blow, and on whose older head descends the 
ample benediction of the victory. On yonder 
height, a hundred years ago, Virginia lay encamped. 
Beyond, and further to the north, watched New 
Hampshire and Vermont. Here in the wooded 
uplands of the south stood New Jersey and New 
York ; while across the river to the east, Connecti- 
cut and Massachusetts closed the triumphal line. 
Here was the symbol of the Revolution, a common 
cause, a common strife, a common triumph ; the 
cause, not of a class, but of human nature ; the 
triumph, not of a colony, but of United America. 
And we who stand here proudly remembering, we 
who have seen Virginia and New York — the 
North and the South — more bitterly hostile than 
the armies whose battles shook this ground, we 
who have mutually proved in deadlier conflict the 
constancy and the courage of all the States, which, 
proud to be peers, yet own no master but their 
united selves, — we renew our hearts in imperish- 
able devotion to the common American faith, the 
common American pride, the common American 
glory ! Here Americans stood and triumphed. 
Here Americans stand and bless their memory. 



POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE. 265 

And here, for a thousand years, may grateful gen- 
erations of Americans come to rehearse the glo- 
rious story, and to rejoice in a supreme and benig- 
nant American nationality ! " 

When, in the winter of 1878, at the age of four- 
score years and four, William CuUen Byrant died, 
Mr. Curtis was invited by the New York Histori- 
cal Society to deliver a commemorative address, 
which he did on December 30 before an assem- 
bly of very unusual distinction, including the 
President, Mr. Hayes, and members of his Cabi- 
net. The address is in curious harmony with the 
subject and the author, and, with the exception of 
that on Lowell, is perhaps the most notable of the 
series delivered by Mr. Curtis. Its spirit is pecu- 
liarly calm, and its style quiet, sustained, and of 
rare purity and simplicity. I think that it re- 
mains the most satisfactory tribute to the noble 
and gifted and yet not popular character of Mr. 
Bryant. It gives, moreover, very interesting in- 
dications of the scholar's nature in Mr. Curtis. 
'' Undoubtedly," he says, " the grandeur and so- 
lemnity of Wordsworth, as Bryant told Dana, had 
stirred his soul with sympathy. But not the false 
simplicity that sometimes betrays Wordsworth, 
nor the lurid melodrama of Byron, nor the aerial 
fervor of Shelley, nor the luxuriant beauty of 
Keats, — in whose line the Greek marble is some- 
times suffused with a splendor of Venetian color, 
— nor in his later years the felicity and richness 
of Tennyson, who has revealed the flexibility and 



286 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

picturesqueness of the English language in lines 
which a line of Keats describes, — 

" ' Like lucent sirups tinct with cinnamon,' — 

not all these varying and entrancing strains, which 
captivated the public of the hour, touched in the 
least the verse of Bryant. His last considerable 
poem, ' The Flood of Years,' but echoes in its med- 
itative flow the solemn cadences of ' Thanatopsis.' 
The child was father of the man. The genius 
of Bryant, not profuse and imperial, neither in- 
tense with dramatic passion nor throbbing with lyr- 
ical fervor, but calm, meditative, pure, has its true 
symbol among his native hills, a mountain spring 
untainted by mineral or slime of earth or reptile 
venom, cool, limpid, and serene. His verse is the 
virile expression of the healthy communion of a 
strong, sound man with the familiar aspects of 
nature, and its broad, clear, open-air quality has a 
certain Homeric suggestiveness." 

It was, however, Bryant the editor, the stead- 
fast and faithful worker in the field where right 
opinion is cultivated, that elicited from Mr. Curtis 
the most eloquent tribute. " It is the lesson of 
this editorial life that public service the most re- 
splendent and the most justly renowned on sea or 
shore, in Cabinet or Congress, however great, 
however beneficent, is not a truer service than that 
of the private citizen like Bryant, who for half 
a century, with conscience and knowledge, with 
power and unquailing courage, did his part in 
holding the hand and heart of his country true to 



POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE. 267 

her now glorious ideal." And again, in still more 
emphatic strain : — 

"It is by no official title, by no mere literary 
fame, by no signal or single service or work, no 
marvelous Lear or Transfiguration, no stroke of 
statecraft calling to political life a new world to 
redress the balance of the old, no resounding Aus- 
terlitz or triumphant Trafalgar, that Bryant is 
commemorated. There may have been, in his long 
lifetime, genius more affluent and creative, greater 
renown, abilities more commanding, careers more 
dazzling and romantic, but no man, no American, 
living or dead, has more truly or amply illustrated 
the scope and the fidelity of republican citizen- 
ship." 

If in these brief quotations I seem to have 
traced in Mr. Curtis's portrait of Bryant some of 
the features of Mr. Curtis's character, it is because 
of the sympathy of aim that inspired both. It is 
not seldom that the literary artist, like the artist 
in portraiture, reveals himself in what he sees in 
his subject. 

Shortly after the delivery of this address, Mr. 
Curtis wrote to Mr. Norton (January 11, 1879): — 

" I think my view of Bryant is not unjust, per- 
haps a generous one, but true to the chief aspects 
of the man. The occasion was magnificent, for it 
was unquestionably the most distinguished audi- 
ence ever assembled in New York. The Presi- 
dent accepted, he said, solely to honor me, and 
Evarts impressed the same truth upon me. After 



268 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

his return the President wrote me a warm little 
note, offering me the German mission. I was 
touched, for I saw his wish ; but I told him that I 
had carefully considered the whole subject on a 
former occasion, and, not without some surrender 
of hopes and ambitions, I had decided that it was 
not wise for me to change the order of my life. 
I had had no misgivings and had none now. 

^' It does not seem to me at fifty-five probable 
that I shall greatly vary the order of that life here- 
after." 

The " order of his life " was, indeed, not to be 
changed, but the principle that directed it was to 
lead him into new and constantly more trying 
contests. In the following year, the Republican 
party in the State of New York nominated for 
governor Mr. Alonzo B. Cornell, a former promi- 
nent office-holder in the Federal service, an ac- 
tive manager of the party machinery based on the 
distribution of the patronage, and a conspicuous 
representative of the group of politicians who had 
set themselves again to nominate General Grant 
for the Presidency in 1880, and to renew that 
domination of the " spoils system " which had fol- 
lowed the breakdown of the first attempt at civil 
service reform. The nomination was accomplished 
by the extreme methods of party manipulation that 
go with the spoils idea, and aroused an intense and 
indignant opposition in the Republican party, which 
took the form of refusal to vote for the candidate 
for governor while voting for other candidates, — 



POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE. 269 

in the technical language of politics, " scratching " 
the name of Mr. Cornell. An organization was 
formed under the title of " Independent Republi- 
cans," commonly referred to, however, as " Scratch- 
ers," to promote this plan of protest. It was so 
far successful that twenty thousand adherents were 
enrolled throughout the State. Mr. Cornell was 
elected by the opposition of Tammany Hall, in 
New York city, to the Democratic candidate, but 
the influence of the independent movement was 
very great and lasting. 

" Among the mortally wounded," wrote Mr. 
Curtis, November 6, " is Conkling. Everybody 
here feels that it is he who has ' engineered ' the 
ridiculous result of a Republican governor elected 
by Tammany Hall in pursuance of a plan to show 
that New York will be a Republican State next 
year. Tilden goes with him, and, it seems to me, 
Sherman likewise. Evarts was, like Disraeli, un- 
speakable." 

The organization of Independent Republicans, 
with this distinct moral advantage to their credit, 
was continued for the presidential year 1880. It 
was plain that they held the '' balance of power " 
in the State of New York, and might easily de- 
cide not merely the Republican candidacy, but the 
Presidency. On May 20, 1880, Mr. Curtis, who 
had warmly supported the movement, addressed 
the organization at a crowded meeting in Chicker- 
ing Hall. 

^' I accepted your invitation," he said, " with 



270 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

great pleasure, as that of Republicans who know 
that the Republican party was founded in freedom 
and for freedom, and who are resolved to keep 
yourselves free. Your action last autumn, as citi- 
zens interested in politics, but without personal or 
mercenary ends, determined not to sacrifice party 
principles to party organization, and quietly hold- 
ing your ground against every form of ridicule and 
hostility, was a public service deserving the public 
gratitude, and full of good augury for the future. 
You were told that you were voting in the air, but 
you knew that such air-guns as yours had done 
great execution ; and if your twenty thousand airy 
shots were noiseless, they hit the mark at which 
they were aimed. The man who is proud never to 
have voted anything but the whole regular party 
ticket shows the servility of soul that makes despo- 
tism possible. 

"It is true that party action becomes impossi- 
ble if every member insists upon having his own 
way. There must be, undoubtedly, general con- 
cession and sacrifice of mere personal preference, 
but every member must decide for himself how far 
this may go and where it must end. No Republi- 
can has a right to appeal to me as a Republican to 
stand by the party who does not do what he can 
to make the party worth standing by. A party is 
made efficient only through men. It is necessarily 
judged by its candidates ; and if its members sup- 
port unworthy candidates to-day for the sake of 
the party, they make it all the easier to support 



POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE. 271 

unworthier candidates to-morrow. If I agree to 
vote for Jeremy Diddler to-day because he is the 
regularly selected standard-bearer of the grand old 
party of honesty and reform, I cannot refuse to 
vote for Benedict Arnold to-morrow because he is 
the standard-bearer of the grand old party of inde- 
pendence and political glory. If the reply be that 
no one pretends that we ought to vote for can- 
didates of bad character, I answer that a candi- 
date who for any reason discredits the party, and 
thereby imperils its success and consequently its 
object, is, from the party point of view, a bad 
man, and fidelity to the party demands the rejec- 
tion of the candidate." 

The address had for its subject " Machine Poli- 
tics and the Remedy." Mr. Curtis's conception of 
machine politics was party management based on 
the spoils of office. His remedy was for the in- 
dividual voter's " scratching " machine candidates ; 
but the general and thorough and lasting remedy 
was the reform of the civil service, and the aboli- 
tion of the use of the offices as spoils. More and 
more this idea was forced upon him as the one of 
chiefest and most urgent importance in the public 
affairs of the nation. 

The movement to nominate General Grant for a 
third term was led by Senator Conkling, the gen- 
eral having become a resident of New York. It 
was strongly resisted in that State and finally 
failed. General James A. Garfield, of Ohio, receiv- 
ing the Republican nomination, and General W. S. 



272 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

Hancock that of the Democrats. Garfield was 
elected, and the civil service reformers, as well as 
the advocates of a more liberal tariff, took heart of 
hope. 

The President was undoubtedly in sympathy with 
the idea of both classes. In his long congressional 
experience he had learned the evils of the spoils 
system, and had denounced them often in a manner 
at once emphatic and intelligent. He had, how- 
ever, shown neither the firmness nor the courage 
essential to carry out an effectual reform by the 
use of the executive authority, adequate as that 
would have been in the hands of a determined and 
independent President. The reformers, however, 
found an unexpected ally in Senator George H. 
Pendleton, of Ohio, who introduced a radical 
though ill-digested bill in Congress. Mr. Pendle- 
ton was a Democrat, of very pronounced party 
feeling, and had immediately after the war been 
associated with the extreme wing of his party, espe- 
cially on financial questions. But he was a man of 
culture, of personal probity, of considerable ability, 
and his accession to the cause of the reform was 
valuable. In 1880 the " New York Civil Service 
Reform Association " was formed, taking the place 
of one that had dissolved early in the administra- 
tion of Mr. Haves, and Mr. Curtis was elected its 
president, a post which he held until his death. 
The first work of the new association was directed 
toward legislation, and the bill of Mr. Pendleton 
was taken as the basis. Little progress was made, 



POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE. 273 

however, at Washington, though kindred associa- 
tions were formed in various parts of the country, 
until, in the summer of 1881, the murderous assault 
upon President Garfield by a half-insane office- 
seeker startled the country to an alarmed sense of 
what the envenomed struggle for place might at any 
time involve. In August the National Civil Ser- 
vice Reform League was formed at Newport, R. I. 
" Of the league," says Mr. William Potts, who be- 
came its secretary, and whose intelligent and untir- 
ing labors in that office were of the greatest value, 
" Mr. Curtis was the inevitable president by com- 
mon consent, and none who heard his words at the 
close of the meeting then doubted more than he 
the end of the work thus entered upon : ' We have 
laid our hands on the barbaric palace of patronage, 
and begun to write on its walls Mene^ mene ! 
Nor, I believe, will the work end till they are laid 
in the dust.' " 

The assassination of President Garfield in 1881 
aroused a powerful public sentiment against the 
spoils system, for the assassin was recognized as 
an abnormal and yet logical product of that sys- 
tem. Craving for spoils, and hatred of the man 
who failed to satisfy it, were the immediate motives 
of his disordered mind. Mr. Chester A. Arthur, 
who as Vice-President succeeded to the duties of 
the President's office, brought the subject of reform 
to the attention of Congress, and " urgently recom- 
mended" an appropriation of $25,000 to renew the 
work of the United States Civil Service Commis- 



274 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

sion which had been dropped in 1873. Congress 
was, however, as yet deaf to the voice of public 
opinion, and only $16,000 was granted, and that 
on the motion of an opposition member. 

The refusal of President Garfield to " recognize " 
the senators from New York, in the distribution of 
Federal patronage in that State, had resulted in a 
violent and open quarrel in the Republican party 
in New York. The resignation of Mr. Blaine as 
secretary of state had greatly embittered the fac- 
tion led by the senators. When, in the fall of 
1882, Mr. Charles J. Folger, then secretary of the 
treasury, had been nominated for governor by the 
Republican party, he encountered determined oppo- 
sition. For the most part this was probably fac- 
tional. The leaders in the State who took part in 
it, and who were in close relations with Mr. Blaine, 
were politicians of much the same character and 
methods as those who secured the nomination of 
Mr. Folger. But, on the other hand, there was 
a profound sentiment of disapproval and disgust 
among those who saw in the nomination an instance 
of the control of party action by the federal admin- 
istration through the abuse of the offices. This 
sentiment was strong among the Independent Re- 
publicans, or " Scratchers," whose movement three 
years previously had elicited the hearty support of 
Mr. Curtis, and he was in complete sympathy with 
them still. When the nomination was made, he 
was at his country home in Ashfield. By one of 
those curious blunders to which editorial offices 



POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE. 275 

are liable in the absence of tbe responsible head, 
an article by Mr. Curtis was modified to commit 
the paper to the support of the candidate. On the 
27th of September he wrote to Mr. Norton : — 

" My dearest Charles, — I have resigned 
the editorship of ' Harper's Weekly.' My article 
upon Folger's nomination, despite my request, was 
perverted and made to misrepresent my views, 
and to make me absolutely ridiculous. The blow 
to me and to the good cause is very great and 
not exactly retrievable. To-day I am thought by 
every reader of the paper to be a futile fool. The 
thing is so atrocious as to be comical." 

It is unnecessary here to trace the source of the 
unfortunate mistake. It was promptly and in the 
most manly manner disavowed by the house of 
Harper & Bros. Mr. Curtis published a letter 
setting himself right with those who had been as- 
tonished at the appearance of the article, and with* 
drew his resignation. The accidental interruption 
of the relations of publishers and editor, which had 
been maintained so honorably on both sides for 
nearly twenty years, had no effect but to strengthen 
mutual confidence and respect. 

In the election of 1882 the Democratic candi- 
date, Grover Cleveland, was elected by a majority 
of nearly two hundred thousand votes, and this 
was accompanied by severe checks and reverses for 
the Republicans in other St^rtes. The first effect 
of these checks and reverses was to awaken in the 
representatives of the Republican party at Wash- 



276 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

ington an entirely new conception of what civil 
service reform was, and of popular opinion regard- 
ing it — and themselves. The Pendleton bill was 
referred to a committee of which Senator Hawley, 
of Connecticut, was chairman, and under his zealous 
and intelligent guidance, assisted by representa- 
tives of the National League, the bill was steadily 
pressed. It received the signature of President 
Arthur on the 16th of January, 1883, and went 
into final operation on the 16th of July, after which 
date no appointment to the civil service was legal 
unless made in accordance with the provisions of the 
law — that is, in compliance with the rules promul- 
gated by the authority of the law, unless expressly 
exempted from them. The system adopted was in 
substance the same as that framed by the commis- 
sion of which Mr. Curtis was chairman in 1871. 
It aimed gradually to apply the principle of ap- 
pointments for fitness attested by competition and 
probation. The essential control of the President 
as the chief appointing officer of the government 
was recognized. A commission was to frame the 
rules which, when he approved them, he was to 
promulgate, and which the commission was then to 
administer. The law expressly forbade contribu- 
tions for political purposes by any person in the 
service to be paid to any person in the service, and 
prohibited all solicitation of such contributions 
within the government offices. The rules were to 
apply to the departmental service at Washington 
above the grade of laborers, and below appoint- 



POLITICAL INDEPENDENCE. 211 

ments made with the advice and consent of the 
Senate, with certain exceptions, and they were to 
apply also to any federal officer outside of Wash- 
ington having fifty or more employees. The heads 
of departments were required to classify the em- 
ployees under them within six months, and thus 
the part of the service to which the rules apply 
came to be generally designated as the " classified 
service." Examinations were to be held under the 
direction of the commission, and those attaining 
in these examinations a certain minimum standard 
were placed on an eligible list in the order of their 
standing for each department or office. When a 
vacancy occurred, the three names highest on the 
list were to be certified to the appointing officer, 
who chose the appointee from these. There was 
also provision for promotion by competition. 

It will be seen that the rules, honestly and intel- 
ligently administered, practically excluded politics 
from the service w^herever they applied. The power 
of removal from office was left untouched, and dis- 
missals for party reasons were not prohibited. It 
was expected, however, by the friends and authors 
of the law, that such dismissals would gradually 
cease as the temptation to make them was destroyed. 
The history of the service shows that removals from 
office are almost uniformly made for one of two pur- 
poses, — either to punish refusal of political as- 
sessments, or to make room for party appointments. 
The law and the rules forbade the former, and 
made the latter extremely difficult. The system 



278 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

as a whole was sound in principle, and capable of 
great good, but it was far from radical. It was 
set in operation by President Arthur in good faith, 
under a commission of which Mr. Dorman B. Eaton 
was the most active member, bringing to it a 
thorough study of the work and marked ability 
with untiring zeal. The provisions made by law 
for the operation of the reform were, however, 
ludicrously and shamefully inadequate, and repre- 
sented the half -concealed hostility of the legislators 
toward it. The appropriation barely covered the 
small salaries of the commission, traveling expenses, 
and office expenses. The examinations had to be 
made by clerks detailed from the service, who re- 
ceived no pay for their work, which was added to 
their regular duties. But it was the happy quality 
of the reform to excite the most generous devotion in 
all honest persons who had to do with it, and it im- 
mediately entered upon a career of practical success 
that has steadily gained with every passing year. 



CHAPTEE XXI. 

THE CANVASS OF 1884. 

" The party issues of the last few years are grad- 
ually disappearing. The perilous questions of fun- 
damental policy have been determined, and the 
paramount interests of the country are now those 
of administration. Honesty and efficiency of ad- 
ministration of the settled national policy will now 
be the chief demand of every party." These were 
the words which, in the closing months of 1871, 
Mr. Curtis had addressed to President Grant in 
submitting his report on the reform of the civil ser- 
vice. Their general prediction was sound. It had 
not come about that '' every party " had demanded 
'' honesty and efficiency of administration," for the 
demands of parties are often framed by men curi- 
ously ignorant either of the general requirements 
of public opinion, or of the requirements of that 
body of voters who are bound by no party, and who 
from time to time dismiss one and call another to 
the control of the government. But, during the 
thirteen years that had passed since Mr. Curtis had 
defined the situation in the words above quoted, 
there had beyond any doubt grown up in the coun- 
try a sentiment steadily stronger and more definite 



280 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 



99 



that "honesty and efficiency of administration 
was the imperative and dominant need of the time. 
The year 1884 was to see the Republican party, 
after nearly a quarter of a century of unbroken 
possession of the presidential office, displaced in 
obedience to this sentiment. 

The presidential contest of 1876 may be said to 
be the last in which the Republican party had 
made its stand almost exclusively on the issues 
growing out of the war. Mr. Hayes, on taking 
office, had made, if not a formal, an unmistakable 
proclamation that these questions could never again 
be controlling. He had withdrawn the Federal 
hand from the States of Louisiana and South 
Carolina, and he had invited a Southern man to a 
prominent place in his Cabinet. During his term 
of office he made every effort, with the approval of 
a large number of his party leaders, to expel the 
" Southern question " from politics, and his efforts 
won general sympathy among the people. In the 
canvass of 1880, Mr. Garfield, though he was a 
veteran of the War for the Union, was opposed by 
General Hancock, a much more conspicuous Union 
veteran; and the chief issue of the contest, so 
far as national policy was involved, was the tariff. 
Mr. Arthur, to whom by the death of the Presi- 
dent it fell to send the first message to the Con- 
gress elected in 1880, for the first time since the 
close of the Civil War transmitted one in which 
no question arising out of the war received any 
serious comment. The "gradual" disappearance 



THE CANVASS OF I884. 281 

of the party questions to which Mr. Curtis had 
alluded in 1871 was now completed. 

By the ordinary course of political development, 
the issue of 1884 should have been the tariff, on 
which parties had been most clearly divided four 
years before, and on which the policy of the oppo- 
sition had been most definitely shaped. And 
though, by the tariff act of 1883, a certain measure 
of reduction in protective duties had been made, in 
pursuance of recommendations far more advanced 
by the commission of 1882, a majority of whom 
were of the Protectionist party, it is probable that 
the tariff would have been the controlling question 
had the party in power nominated almost any of 
its prominent leaders other than Mr. James G. 
Blaine. That nomination made the decisive fact 
in the canvass the opinion of the country as to the 
personal character of the candidate, and this opin- 
ion on the whole was adverse. The decisive fact 
was not, of course, the only one, nor, in a sense, 
was it the chief one. The great body of each party 
was doubtless guided by that powerful and complex 
and not clearly defined force which we know as 
party feeling, and was not seriously affected by the 
known or inferred character of either candidate. 
And there was a certain influence exerted indepen- 
dent of party association by other causes, such as 
the race sentiment elicited among voters of Irish 
birth or descent in behalf of Mr. Blaine, and the 
counteracting influence of the religious sentiment 
aroused by the fact that the Catholic priesthood 



282 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

was reported — on no specific evidence — to be en- 
listed in his behalf. Again, there was the effect 
of the association of a considerable number of men 
formerly active in the Democratic party with the 
highly protected interests dependent on the tariff. 
But the outcome of the forces on either side was 
so nearly equal to that of those on the other side, 
that it remains probable that, had the question 
of Mr. Blaine's character been eliminated from 
the canvass, the decision would have been in his 
favor. 

But this decisive element was not a simple one. 
If Mr. Blaine failed in the election because of the 
adverse opinion of a considerable body of voters 
as to his character, it was because the defects at- 
tributed to him were of public interest and not of 
a private nature, and he was regarded as a repre- 
sentative of a class whose power it was right and 
necessary to curb. The particular fault that his 
opponents dwelt most upon was the use of public 
office for private advantage, and there was a deep- 
seated conviction that that was the most serious, 
general, and threatening evil of the times. Mr. 
Curtis, in an address on Staten Island on the Cen- 
tennial Anniversary of Independence, eight years 
previously, had invited his fellow-citizens to this 
pledge : " That we will try public and private men 
by precisely the same moral standard, and that 
no man who directly or indirectly connives at cor- 
ruption or coercion to acquire office or retain it, 
or who prostitutes any opportunity or position of 



THE CANVASS OF I884,. 283 

public service to his own or another's advantage, 
shall have our countenance or our vote." There 
was evidence, which many of Mr. Blaine's fellow 
Republicans found conclusive, that in one distinct 
instance he had been willing to prostitute an op- 
portunity and position of public service to his own 
advantage, and there was nothing in his public 
career to contradict the inference. There was 
much to confirm it. He had been in public life 
for a quarter of a century, and had attained a po- 
sition of great influence and power in his party. 
His ability as a political leader was eminent, while 
his popularity was probably more extended than 
that of any man since Clay. But his rare gifts 
and great power had certainly not been devoted to 
promoting the purity or raising the general level 
of public life or of party action. He was inti- 
mately identified, on the contrary, with the ten- 
dency, so obvious since the close of the Civil War, 
in the opposite direction. Republicans who had 
faithfully, unselfishly, and from the sincerest con- 
viction, labored to construct and maintain their 
party because it was to them the best instrument for 
promoting the best interests of the country, sought 
in vain in Mr. Blaine's record the evidence that 
his real aims were theirs, and reluctantly came to 
regard him as the typical opponent of those aims. 
He had shown no efficient sympathy with the re- 
form movement which sought to exclude party 
politics from the public service. On the contrary 
he owed very much of his power in his own party 



284 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

to the unscrupulous use of offices, and the violent 
disruption of his party in the State of New York 
in 1882 had been promoted by his friends largely 
because of resentment at their failure to receive 
the share they wished in patronage. 

There was another phase of Mr. Blaine's career 
which bore upon his willingness to prostitute the 
opportunities of public service to his own advan- 
tage, and which furnished evidence not so clear 
and conclusive, but indicating even more danger- 
ous proclivities. He had long been recognized as 
the leader of the sentiment in favor of a " vigor- 
ous " foreign policy, and that recognition was a 
potent element in the gratification of his ambition. 
During the brief time that he had been in the 
Cabinet of President Garfield, he had shown what 
was his conception of a vigorous foreign policy. 
He had in two cases undertaken to impose the 
influence of the United States government upon 
a friendly foreign government — once upon Chili 
and once upon Mexico — in a manner unwarranted 
by international law, and opposed to the tradi- 
tional impartiality of our policy in dealing with 
other nations. In both instances his failure had 
been complete and humiliating. In one he had in^ 
curred serious peril of a quarrel ; in the other he 
had been subjected to contemptuous neglect. His 
course had produced a profound feeling of distrust 
among intelligent and conservative observers, who 
saw in it a reckless attempt to cultivate a dan- 
gerous popularity at the cost of the interests and 
honor of his country. 



THE CANVASS OF 1884. 285 

On the anniversary of Washington's birthday 
in 1884, a dinner was given by the Young Men's 
Republican Club of Brooklyn, a very powerful 
and intelligent organization with a large number 
of very independent members, — at which a num- 
ber of leading men spoke, all of them urging 
strongly the need of the Republican party for a 
candidate of sound character. Mr. Curtis did not 
attend the dinner, but wrote a letter in full sym- 
pathy with the speakers. On the 24th of Febru- 
ary a conference of Republicans was held in the 
city of New York, at which Mr. Curtis was pres- 
ent, with Republicans from many parts of the 
country, and particularly from New England, at 
which a resolution was adopted declaring the im- 
perative necessity of Republican candidates who 
would " warrant confidence in their readiness to 
defend the advance already made toward divor- 
cing the public service from party politics, and to 
continue these advances till the separation has 
been made final and complete." An organization 
was formed to promote the purpose of the confer- 
ence and an " Independent Republican Commit- 
tee " named, of which General Francis C. Barlow 
was president, and Mr. Joseph W. Harper treas- 
urer. 

The Republican National Convention was held 
early in June in the city of Chicago, where, 
twenty-four years before, Mr. Lincoln, the first suc- 
cessful candidate of the Republican party, had been 
nominated. Mr. Curtis was chosen as a delegate 



286 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

from the county of Eiclimond (Staten Island), 
where he resided. His first choice, like that of 
most of the Republicans who were in sympathy 
with him, for the nomination, was Senator George 
F, Edmunds, of Vermont, a man of high character 
and great ability, who had up to that time given 
many evidences of his independence of party dic- 
tation. When the convention met, it was apparent 
that it was unevenly divided between the support- 
ers of Blaine, Arthur, and Edmunds, the first- 
named having the greatest number, but not a 
majority of the convention. The very unusual sit- 
uation and the condition of party sentiment were 
recognized when, on the 4th of June, before the 
convention had decided to proceed to vote for 
nominees, a resolution was introduced declaring 
that every delegate who took part in the conven- 
tion was " bound in honor to support the nominee." 
Mr. Curtis promptly protested against its adoption. 
" A Republican and a free man," he declared, " I 
came to this convention, and by the grace of God 
a Republican and a free man will I go out of it." 
The resolution was finally withdrawn. 

When the balloting was begun, it was evident 
that Mr. Blaine was to secure the nomination un- 
less the supporters of Arthur and Edmunds could 
combine upon one or the other of these two. Such 
a combination was impossible. The two men rep- 
resented in the convention totally different and 
opposite ideas of the question which had divided 
the party. That question had been clearly de- 



THE CANVASS OF I884. 287 

fined by the Independent Republican conference 
in February. It was the divorce of the public ser- 
vice from party politics. Mr. Arthur, though he 
had enforced the civil service law within the nar- 
row limits of the rules, was not only a believer in 
the spoils doctrine, but one of the most conspicu- 
ous and experienced and least scrupulous of the 
leaders who had put it in practice and profited by 
doing so. He owed very much of the strength he 
was able to show in the convention to the use of 
Federal patronage. He had won a certain degree 
of confidence in the country by his dignified and 
conservative management of foreign affairs, by his 
liberal views as to the tariff, and his entire sound- 
ness on questions of finance ; but while, as to these 
matters, he compared favorably with Mr. Blaine, 
none of them was of controlling importance. The 
supporters ot Mr. Edmunds could not give their 
votes to him without openly defeating their chief 
purpose. His supporters could not give their 
votes to Mr. Edmunds without abandoning the 
hopes that animated most of them. The combina- 
tion could not be made, and Mr. Blaine was nomi- 
nated. The usual motion was offered to "make 
the nomination unanimous," and was carried. Mr. 
Curtis did not vote upon it, and refused the urgent 
appeals to second it. He remained in the conven- 
tion, taking part in the subsequent proceedings, 
until its close, this being what he understood to be 
his duty as a representative. 

"Harper's Weekly" promptly condemned the 



288 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

action of the Republican Convention. When the 
Democratic National Convention placed in nomina- 
tion Mr. Cleveland, then governor of the State of 
New York, Mr. Curtis, after careful deliberation, 
decided to advocate his election. He was immedi- 
ately recognized as the representative of the Re- 
publican defection. With Mr. Carl Schurz, he 
took the leadership of that movement ; his own 
position differing from that of Mr. Schurz in this, 
that, while their view of the duty of the hour was 
the same, Mr. Schurz, by his support of Horace 
Greeley in 1872, had broken that association with 
his party which with Mr. Curtis had been uninter- 
rupted. 

Mr. Curtis' s decision, though painful, was inev- 
itable. The Republican party had, in his sober 
judgment, ceased to pursue the aims which he 
had so long sought through it. It had nominated 
a candidate whose election he believed would de- 
feat those aims. The course of the party had been 
taken in opposition to every possible effort on his 
part to prevent it. He had labored with all his 
energy and influence to convince his party of the 
error and danger toward which it was tending. 
Nor had he failed, repeatedly, definitely, and em- 
phatically, to declare the principles of party alle- 
giance by which he had consistently been guided. 
He had openly advocated Republican effort to de- 
feat bad Republican candidates in his own State, 
in Massachusetts, in Pennsylvania. He had done 
so avowedly for the purpose of saving the party 



THE CANVASS OF 1884. 289 

from the control of those who made bad candidates 
possible ; and he had never concealed his convic- 
tion that, if this purpose failed in the national or- 
ganization, the same principle would demand the 
same action. 

He wrote, immediately after the convention, to a 

very old friend : — 

June 10, 1884. 

My dear S., — I am very sorry indeed that our 
sense of duty differs so widely. I cannot urge any- 
body to support for the presidency a man who has 
trafficked in his official place for his private gain, 
. and still less upon the ground that the party that 
nominated him is a better party than the other. 
There would never be any better party, or indeed 
any party but that to which we belong, if every- 
thing that it did and everybody that it nominated 
should be sustained because it was not so bad as 
another party. I did not support Cornell in 1879, 
because of his ring associations and methods. I did 
not support Folger in 1882, because of the forgery 
and fraud which secured his nomination. But I 
had no personal objection to the men. It is not 
Blaine's " brilliancy," it is the low and venal sys- 
tem of his politics, of which we had the latest and 
monstrous evidence at Chicago, that shall not mas- 
ter the Kepublican party if I can help it. When 
the only argument is that we are not so bad as 
the other fellows, it is time to call a halt. 

My dear boy, I should be recreant to my con- 
science, and I should bitterly disappoint all those 



290 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

who are accustomed to look to me, if, after all that 
I have said about political morality, I should now 
support for the presidency the one man who is 
most repugnant to the political conscience of young 
Republicans. I am in hearty agreement with the 
Harpers, who are unanimous upon the point that 
such a course would be disastrous, and you can 
hardly imagine how deep and strong the feeling of 
outrage is. 

I wish with all my heart that we agreed about 
the matter, and with all the old affection I am al- 
ways yours. 

Mr. Curtis felt keenly the accusation brought 
against him of personal bad faith in taking part in 
a convention and then refusing to accept its can- 
didate. His conscience was entirely clear, but he 
knew that many who had long respected and trusted 
him and followed his leadership, many whom he be- 
lieved to be as sincere as he was himself, and even 
some old and cherished friends, thought his course 
dishonorable, and the knowledge was exceedingly 
hard to bear. Yet it is clear that no other course 
was open to him. " No honorable man," he wrote 
in an open letter to a critic of his action, June 25, 
1884, " in a convention or out of it, would allow a 
majority to bind him to a course which he morally 
disapproved." In the autumn of 1885 he wrote 
to a correspondent who had raised this question a 
letter which I find so explicit and compact that I 
give it as the best statement of his view : — 



THE CANVASS OF I884. 291 

" I have received your note, and have time only 
for a brief reply. The action of a convention 
is merely a recommendation, and its authority is 
merely that of a majority. Now, a majority can- 
not morally or honorably bind a participant in any 
consultation to support its action if he morally 
disapproves of it. The fact that he is there to pre- 
vent such action is certainly not a reason for him 
to support it if taken, because that conclusion 
would make the man who actively endeavors to 
prevent it more bound by it than one who stays at 
home and takes no part. As a delegate, the mem- 
ber of a convention votes and does his delegated 
duty to the best of his ability. Having discharged 
that special duty, his general duty as a citizen re- 
curs, and he is to weigh the action of the conven- 
tion like every other citizen, and vote only as his 
conscience directs. 

" There are perhaps five millions of party voters 
on each side ; a convention is composed of about 
800 members of the party. The majority would 
be 401 ; and to say that the remaining 399 who 
have opposed the decision are honorably bound by 
it if they conscientiously disapprove, while all the 
other millions and thousands of members are not 
bound, is simply folly." 

I have given this statement of Mr. Curtis's views 
on this matter because, at the time and long after, 
though it did not disturb, it saddened him. For 
my own part, it seems to me to have given occa- 
sion for much political casuistry, as to which preju- 



292 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

dice and interest and unreflecting sentiment have 
"wrought confusion, but as to which the verdict of 
justice and common sense is beyond all mistake. 
If the doctrine of Mr. Curtis's critics were to pre- 
vail, self-respecting men would not act as delegates 
to political conventions, and party rule would 
rapidly and inevitably become corrupt. The in- 
dependence he asserted is the indispensable con- 
dition precedent to rational and decent politics. 
Unfortunately human nature does not always de- 
velop reason or decency under the influence of 
strenuous party passion. Though the criticism to 
which I have referred was that which affected Mr. 
Curtis most, it was by no means all he had to bear. 
It is simply impossible to give any idea of the 
abuse, the insult, the scurrility, that were heaped 
upon him in the public press, and in letters, usually 
anonymous, addressed to him. It was a startling 
revelation to him of the vulgarity and brutality of 
a large number of the men with whom and for 
whom he had so faithfully and unselfishly labored. 
Necessarily it only confirmed him in the course he 
had taken. It was conclusive proof, if any were 
needed, of the extent to which the evil against 
which he had revolted had spread in the Republi- 
can party. The vile spirit shown, because an hon- 
orable and conscientious leader had found himself 
forced into opposition, was a spirit that would have 
been no less vile, and infinitely more dangerous, 
had he submitted to the party dictation and the 
party had won. Mr. Curtis's service to his coun- 



THE CANVASS OF I884. 293 

try while he acted with the Republican party was 
in my judgment very great. It was completed and 
exceeded by the service he rendered when he left 
the party, and pursued through another party the 
same high purpose. 



CHAPTER XXII. 

THE LEADER OF REFORM. 

During the remaining years of his life, Mr. Cur- 
tis's relation to public affairs was strictly that of 
an independent critic, and his chief object was the 
promotion of civil service reform, of which he was 
now the acknowledged leader and representative. 
In "Harper's Weekly," of course, his criticism 
embraced a wide field, and several important and 
interesting questions — the tariff, the currency, 
foreign matters, the relation of the President to 
Congress, which came up within this period — re- 
ceived a fair share of attention, and were discussed 
candidly, and in the main intelligently. But none 
of them interested him as did the reform. To the 
latter, also, he devoted a great deal of personal 
labor and study. His offices as president of the 
National Civil Service Reform League and of the 
New York Civil Service Reform Association gave 
him an opportunity for effective work which he 
embraced with the utmost ardor, and pursued with 
unwearied energy. No important step was taken 
anywhere without his approval, and very much 
that was done was due to his initiative. His cor- 
respondence was, on this subject alone, enough to 



THE LEADER OF REFORM. 295 

tax the patience and strength of any man, but It 
was never neglected and rarely deferred. His 
attendance at all committees was faithful, and his 
part in their work a marvel of patience, vigilance, 
sound judgment, and inspiring zeal. It was my 
fortune to be associated with him in a considerable 
part of these labors, mostly in those of a relatively 
routine nature, conducted quietly and with none of 
the excitement of public efforts. He early made 
upon me the impression of extraordinary practical 
force. He was devoid of the vanity, the f ussiness, 
the obstinacy and narrowness, that are so unpleas- 
antly obvious in many able and sincere men de- 
voted to reform movements. With great single- 
ness of purpose, he was peculiarly open-minded, as 
eager to learn as to teach, as ready to follow as to 
lead. His tact was unfailing, because it was the 
natural expression of his sympathetic and consider- 
ate nature. No one who came into active relations 
with him in this peculiar work but was uncon- 
sciously encouraged to do his best. Even the 
bores — and Heaven knows that they were not 
wanting — forgot to betray their full tediousness 
under the influence of his gentle and firm guid- 
ance. He seemed so unaffectedly to expect from 
every one the fullest measure of unselfish and 
modest service that it was impossible to refuse it. 

The reform enlisted many able men from differ- 
ent parts of the Union. The lawyers naturally 
were the most numerous, but there were represent- 
atives of all professions and occupations, many 



296 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

of them of national repute. I think it is not an 
exaggeration to say that the leadership of Mr. Cur- 
tis, never asserted and equally never concealed, 
was universally conceded. This, of course, was in 
some degree due to the fact that no one else gave 
to the work the same amount of time and study. 
In his own mind, I should say that it was the op- 
portunity presented, and the responsibility imposed, 
by this leadership that chiefly impressed him, and 
these were met with a courage, assiduity, and mi- 
nute and constant care, such as few men give save 
under the spur of interest or ambition. 

The feature of greatest public interest in Mr. 
Curtis's reform work was his annual address at the 
meeting of the National League. This was deliv- 
ered each year on the first evening of the two-day 
meeting, and consisted primarily of a review of the 
course of the reform for the year just closed, a state- 
ment of what remained to be done, indications of 
the next steps feasible, and always included an argu- 
ment and an appeal for the general cause. These 
addresses, with some earlier ones and Mr. Curtis's 
report as chairman of the Civil Service Commission 
made to President Grant in 1871, form the second 
volume of the " Orations and Addresses " pub- 
lished after his death. This volume is in some re- 
spects the most valuable of the published writings 
of Mr. Curtis. In it will be found the substance 
of what he had to say on the phase of public affairs 
that engrossed the most of his thought, energy, 
and time during the last twenty years of his life. 



THE LEADER OF REFORM. 297 

Here is his explanation of what it was in our poli- 
tics that needed reform ; of what the consequences 
would be if the reform were not brought about ; of 
what would be the immediate and the progressive 
benefits, should the reform succeed, of the general 
principles and the specific aims and methods of re- 
form. It was by no means a simple or narrow 
cause in which he had enlisted. Its most apparent 
scope — the improvement of the civil service, mak- 
ing it efficient, clean, reasonably economical, and 
an honorable career for honorable men — was cer- 
tainly not unimportant, and it was never ignored 
or underestimated by Mr. Curtis, who in this as 
in other matters was sensible and practical. But 
in comparison with the wider and ultimate effect 
sought upon the politics of the country, upon its 
public life, the character of the government, and 
the public conscience, this primary effect of the 
reform was, in his mind, subordinate and inciden- 
tal. Had the reform been confined to its attain- 
ment, we may be sure that he would have given 
to it, as he did to numberless movements of minor 
and relatively passing interest, a cordial advocacy 
proportioned to its real merit, but nothing more. 
He never would have surrendered to it the days 
and nights of steady labor, the deep and anxious 
study, the patient attention to detail, that he gave 
gladly to civil service reform. Nor could it have 
inspired him to any of the more important of these 
addresses, which are, in their kind, among the 
best that remain from Mr. Curtis, and among the 



298 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

best that the history of political life in the United 
States affords. 

The struggle for reform was in fact to Mr. Cur- 
tis, as I have already suggested, another struggle 
for popular freedom, for the assertion of the na- 
tional conscience, for the gradual repression and 
the final abolition of a tyranny not differing in es- 
sence from that of the slave power. He found this 
tyranny — and he had no difficulty in demonstrating 
the fact — as unjust and as debasing within its limits 
as the one that fell with the triumph of the Union 
armies. And in some regards it was more danger- 
ous, because less obvious, more insidious and ob- 
scure, and less easily arousing the indignant revolt 
of the moral sense of the people. It was the con- 
sciousness of this truth that awakened and kept 
alive in him for so many years that fervent and 
unflagging zeal, that generous and firm devotion, of 
which these addresses are the witness. 

Any one who will read the volume will not fail 
to be impressed by the development of Mr. Curtis's 
conception of the range of the reform, and of his 
manner of discussing it. The substance of all the 
chief arguments is, indeed, to be found in the earli- 
est addresses, and in the report to President Grant 
in 1871. But with the progress of the reform, 
with the unfolding of the way in which it impressed 
both its friends and its foes, with the changed con- 
ditions of politics and the varying policy of succes- 
sive administrations, there conies a very striking 
extension of Mr. Curtis's treatment of the subject. 



THE LEADER OF REFORM. 299 

Probably the address at the eleventh annual meet- 
ing of the National League in Baltimore in 1892, in 
the spring of the year in which he died, may be ac- 
cepted as the fullest and most impressive statement 
of the whole matter. I am not aware that Mr. Cur- 
tis had at that time any serious concern as to his 
health ; but he was in his sixty-ninth year, he had 
had some of the warnings which age brings of the 
limit of human energy and endurance. Looking 
over the large circle of his associates, many of them 
affectionate friends, all of them admiring and trust- 
ing followers, he must have missed some who 
twenty years before had stood by his side. He saw 
very few who had reached his age, and, I think, 
none that had given to the cause the long years of 
wearing labor that he had given. Possibly there 
was a half-recognized sense that he was nearing 
the end. Assuredly the address was such as he 
might have made had he known that it was the 
final legacy to the beloved cause, the farewell 
words of instruction and guidance and inspiration. 
In this address he made the clearest and most 
complete statement of the underlying principle of 
the reform. When he came to publish it, he gave 
it the title, " Party and Patronage." Its subject 
was the need of curbing the encroachment of ex- 
ecutive power lodged in party and maintained by 
patronage. He traced the resistance of the Eng- 
lish Parliament to the pretensions of the royal pre- 
rogative, and the resistance of the colonies to the 
pretensions of the English Parliament, and he de- 



300 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

scribed the action of the framers of the Constitu- 
tion with the purpose of limiting the use of the ap- 
pointing power : — 

" The people had assumed their own government, 
but, as they could not administer it directly, it was 
administered by agents selected by party, or the 
organized majority, but under such restrictions as 
the whole body of the voters, or the people, might 
impose. The crown had vanished. There was no 
king or permanent executive. There were a Presi- 
dent and legislature elected by the people for lim- 
ited terms. But the practical agency of the gov- 
ernment was party, and, whoever might be elected 
President, party remained in the administration 
permanent as a king, and with the same control 
of the executive power. But the executive power, 
whether in the hands of a king or party, does not 
change its nature. It seeks its own aggrandize- 
ment and cannot safely be trusted. Buckle says 
that no man is wise enough and strong enough to be 
vested with absolute authority. It fires his brain 
and maddens him. But this, which is true of an 
individual, is not less true of an aggregate of indi- 
viduals or of a party. A party or a majority needs 
watching as much as a king. Indeed, that such 
distrust is the safeguard of democracy against des- 
potism is a truth as old as Demosthenes. Like a 
sleuth-hound, distrust must follow executive power, 
however it may double and whatever form it may 
assume. It is as much the safeguard of popular 
right against the will of a party as against the pre- 



THE LEADER OF REFORM. 301 

rogative of a king. Distrust is in fact the instinct 
of enlightened political sagacity, which sees that 
the peril of popular institutions lies in the abuse of 
the forms of popular government. The great com- 
monplace of our political speech, ' Eternal vigilance 
is the price of liberty,' is fundamentally true. It 
is a scripture essential to political salvation. The 
demand for civil service reform is the cry of that 
eternal vigilance for still further restriction by the 
people of the delegated executive power. 

" Civil service reform, therefore, is but another 
successive step in the development of liberty un- 
der law. It is not eccentric or revolutionary. It 
is a logical measure of political progress. In the 
light of a larger experience, and adjusted to the 
exigencies of a republic in the nineteenth cen- 
tury instead of a monarchy in the thirteenth and 
seventeenth centuries, in the spirit of the wise jeal- 
ousy of the Constitution, in the interest of free 
institutions and of honest government, it proposes 
still further to restrict the executive power as exer- 
cised by party. It is a measure based upon the 
observation of a century, during which government 
by party has developed conditions and tendencies 
and perils which could not have been foreseen in 
detail, although, at the beginning of party govern- 
ment under the Constitution, Washington said of 
party spirit : ' It exists under different shapes in 
all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or 
repressed ; but in those of popular form it is seen in 
its greatest rankness, and is truly their worst enemy.' 



302 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

" What our fathers could not guess, we can see. 
Party, which is properly simply the organization of 
citizens who agree in their views of public policy 
to secure the enactment of their views in law, has 
become what is well called a machine, which con- 
trols the political action of millions of citizens who 
vote for candidates that the machine selects, and 
for measures that the machine dictates or approves. 
Servility to party takes the place of individual in- 
dependence of action. So completely does it con- 
sume political manhood, that, like men suddenly 
hurried from their warm beds into the night air, 
shivering and chattering in the cold, even intelli- 
gent citizens who have protested against their 
party machine as fraudulent and false, and an or- 
ganized misrepresentation of the party conviction 
and will, declare that if their protest against the 
power of fraud and corruption' does not avail, and 
the party commands them to yield, they will bow 
the head and bend the knee in loyalty to fraud and 
corruption. The despotism of the machine is so 
absolute, and the triumph of the party so supersedes 
the reason and purpose of the party, that we have 
now reached a point in our political development 
when, upon the most vital and pressing public 
questions, parties do not even know their own 
opinions, and factions of the same party wrangle 
fiercely to determine by a majority what the party 
thinks and proposes. Meanwhile, so completely 
has the conception of a party as merely a conven- 
ient but clumsy agency to promote certain public ob- 



THE LEADER OF REFORM. 303 

jects disappeared tliat one of the chief journals of 
the country recently remarked with entire gravity 
that it found ' no fault with conscientious independ- 
ence in politics,' which was like announcing with 
lofty forbearance that, as a philosophic moralist, it 
found no fault with truth-telling or honest dealing. 
"But it is by party action, nevertheless, that 
reform must be secured. Why, then, do we an- 
ticipate success? Because party itself is finally 
subject to public opinion, and, whatever the ma- 
chine may wish, it is at last obliged to conform 
to public opinion, as a sailing-ship to the wind. 
Party machines, truculent and defiant, resist, but 
like kings they yield at last to, the people. The 
king, whose arbitrary excesses produce the per- 
emptory popular demand for relief, ordains, how- 
ever reluctantly, a restriction that limits his power. 
So the French Bourbon, Louis XVIII., signed the 
Charter of 1814, and the Prussian HohenzoUern, 
Frederic William IV., summoned the Constituent 
Assembly of 1848. They call this surrender motu 
proprio^ an act of their sovereign will. But they 
knew, and the world knows, that it is the will of a 
greater sovereign than they, the will of the people. 
Our appeal is now, as it has always been, not to 
party, but to the people, who are masters of party. 
As the English barons, in the phrase of an old 
English writer, cut the claws of John ; as the 
English Parliament taught terribly the English 
king that not he, but the English people, was the 
sovereign ; as the American colonies taught the 



304 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

English Parliament in turn that the American 
people would rule America, — so, by every law and 
custom demanded by public opinion which re- 
strains the arbitrary abuse of executive power by 
party, the American people are constantly teaching 
American parties that not the parties but the peo- 
ple rule. We cannot expect the king nor the 
Parliament nor the party to solicit the lesson or 
to enjoy the discipline. We cannot expect their 
supple courtiers, either in the palace or in the 
saloon, to demand that the king or the party shall 
be bound. But bound nevertheless they are, bound 
by the people they have been, and bound by the 
same power they will be. The record of this year, 
as of the last year and of every year since the 
League was formed ; even the reiterated pledges 
of platforms, although reiterated only to be largely 
broken ; the most sweet voices of the stump, that 
sink into barren silence ; the bills introduced that 
gasp and die in committee on the one hand, and 
on the other the constantly enlarged scope of the 
reformed system in the public service, — all reveal 
the ever-stronger public purpose, and the con- 
stantly greater achievement of that purpose, to 
add in civil service reform another golden link to 
the shining chain of historical precedents which, 
by wisely restraining executive power, promote the 
public welfare." 

It is plain, from the extracts that I have given 
not only from his later speeches but from others, 
that the standard of reform with Mr. Curtis was 



THE LEADER OF REFORM. 305 

very high, — that he regarded it as of national 
importance, and had gradually, after his service 
on the commission, come to place it above any ob- 
ject professed or pursued by either of the great 
parties. During the eleven years that he presided 
over the National Reform League, it was his duty 
to judge the party in power by this standard. 
This was not an easy task. In 1884 he spoke 
in the very height of the bitter and heated contest 
for the presidency between the party he had re- 
pudiated and the one to which he had brought 
his support, — qualified, indeed, and guarding his 
perfect independence, but requiring the imme- 
diate and absolute choice between the candidate of 
one and the candidate of the other. From 1885 
to 1888 he spoke with Mr. Cleveland in the Presi- 
dent's office, and was obliged, applying to the 
known acts of the administration the standard he 
had defined, to describe wherein the administration 
fell short, and how far the President for whom he 
had voted was responsible for the shortcomings. 
From 1889 to 1892 he was again forced to survey 
the course of his old party, to apply to it with 
equal sincerity and equal fairness the same search- 
ing tests. It will be seen that his peculiar and 
trying function was exercised during each of two 
national elections, in which, as an editor and a 
leader of public opinion, he took an active and in 
one of them a decisive part, and each of which was 
followed by a change in the party in possession of 
the presidency. It was practically impossible that 



306 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS, 

what he said should not influence party action, 
nor did he seek to avoid such an effect. It was 
equally impossible that he should escape the accu- 
sation of partisan prejudice and exaggeration, how- 
ever anxious he was not to give either justification 
or excuse for such accusation. I think it is a rea- 
sonable judgment on his work that he was singu- 
larly fair, not only in intention, but in the labor, 
study, reflection, and consultation that he devoted 
to ascertaining the facts, and to determining their 
real significance and value. I thought so at the 
time, weighing the addresses as they were delivered 
from year to year, and I am strongly confirmed in 
the opinion by a careful review of them. A very 
significant piece of evidence upon this point is the 
fact that, among the active workers for civil service 
reform who were intimately associated with him in 
the league, and who may be said to have felt a 
pretty definite though indirect responsibility for 
his utterances while their association with him 
lasted, were a number of ardent and convinced 
Republicans and equally convinced and ardent 
Democrats, and, so far as I am aware, none of 
them felt called upon in any degree to free them- 
selves from that responsibility. Friends and advo- 
cates of the reform who were supporters of Mr. 
Blaine, and who condemned unqualifiedly Mr. Cur- 
tis's choice in 1884, found his speech of that year 
without any fault that they felt themselves re- 
quired to point out. The most resolute Democratic 
reformers conceded his fairness to Mr. Cleveland. 



THE LEADER OF REFORM. 307 

The most — I cannot say enthusiastic, for I do 
not recall any — but the most friendly, supporters 
of Mr. Harrison were ready to make a correspond- 
ing concession. Abuse there was, of course, from 
both sides, and much honest and sincere but igno- 
rant misconception. But the men who followed 
Mr. Curtis's course most closely, knew it most 
completely, and could best pass upon its motives, 
were entirely satisfied of his candor and loyalty. 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

THE TYPICAL INDEPENDENT. 

The year 1888 presented to those who had re- 
fused to support the Republican candidate four 
years before, and had given their votes to Mr. 
Cleveland, the not wholly simple question of 
whether they would return to their former asso- 
ciation. The message of President Cleveland in 
December, 1887, devoted chiefly to the question of 
taxation forced upon the country by the enormous 
surplus and accumulation of revenue, made the 
tariff the chief issue of the presidential campaign. 
The failure to nominate Mr. Blaine eliminated his 
personal character as an obvious and unquestioned 
element in the decision. The manifest tendency 
of a very large part of the Democratic party to- 
wards unsound and dangerous financial legislation, 
which appeared to command the assent of a ma- 
jority of that party and to be opposed by a majority 
of the Republicans, was a matter not lightly to be 
dismissed. The policy of Mr. Cleveland as to ad- 
ministrative reform had not been consistent, and 
had been fairly though roughly described as for 
reform or against it, according as the reform senti- 
ment did or did not control the decisive vote in any 



THE TYPICAL INDEPENDENT 309 

given State. In these circumstances a considerable 
number of the Republicans, who with Mr. Curtis 
had supported Mr. Cleveland in 1884, now gave 
their support to the Republican candidate, Gen. 
Benjamin Harrison. Mr. Curtis decided that his 
duty was otherwise. His view of the question was 
explained in some detail in a letter addressed to a 
correspondent who had written him a letter of 
friendly disapproval and criticism. I give it, in 
preference to any public utterance, as being pecu- 
liarly characteristic : — 

TO A. C. TILDEN, SAN FRANCISCO. 

New York, 12th September, 1888. 

My DEAR Sir, — I am very much obliged to you 
for your frank and friendly letter of the 4th, and I 
am very glad to answer it in the same spirit. 

My strong anti-slavery feeling made me a Repub- 
lican, and the original purpose and character and 
membership of the party seem to me to have been 
more humane, progressive, and truly American than 
that of any other party. But as a Republican, after 
the primary purpose of the party had been attained 
by the result of the war, I was constantly engaged in 
withstanding the party tendency to political abuse 
and corruption. This culminated in 1884 by the 
nomination to the presidency of a man who, in my 
judgment,- had trafficked in his official place for his 
personal profit. The election of such a man would 
have been disgraceful to the party and dishonorable 
to the country, and this consideration was para- 
mount to all others. 



810 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

I therefore supported Mr. Cleveland, not because 
I had renounced my Republican principles, but be- 
cause I held to them, and as the surest way of 
securing the defeat of Mr. Blaine, and because I 
believed Mr. Cleveland to be an honest and cour- 
ageous man who would resist any mischievous ten- 
dency of his party. During his term it has been 
evident that the spirit of Mr. Blaine is that of the 
Republican party, and that he is at present its true 
representative. Mr. Cleveland has resisted much 
in his party, but not as much as I had hoped. 
But I still regard him as honest and courageous. 
Now, as the chief issue of the campaign is the 
method of reducing the revenue, and as I agree 
with Mr. Cleveland's policy and look upon the Re- 
publican policy as very injurious, and as I see that 
Mr. Blaine is the controlling genius of his party, 
and that a vote for Mr. Harrison is really a vote 
for Mr. Blaine, the same principles that made me 
vote for the Republican candidate formerly induce 
me to vote for Mr. Cleveland now. 

But I am not a Democrat. I shall vote against 
Mr. Hill, the Democratic candidate for governor 
in New York, and I think Mr. Cleveland much 
better than his party. I am an Independent, and 
I am so for the same reasons that made me a Re- 
publican formerly. The purposes that I would 
promote were then uniformly to be served by 
supporting that party. But all the circumstances 
are changed, and now I can serve them best by 
voting independently of party names. 



THE TYPICAL INDEPENDENT. 311 

If my principles had been changed for any un- 
worthy purpose, there would be truly a shade upon 
my name. But they are the same now that they 
were when I stumped for Fremont in '66, and sup- 
ported Lincoln, the greatest of modern Americans, 
in 1860 and '64. In the sense in which you use 
the words, I am not an adherent of Mr. Cleveland. 
I have been disappointed in much that he has done, 
and have said so plainly and publicly. I think 
him honest, although often sophisticated, and in the 
present situation support him as the better alter- 
native. Should Mr. Harrison be elected, I should 
hope to be equally just in my estimate of his con- 
duct. 

I write this long statement because I should be 
very sorry that a young man, who from what he 
has heard of me is inclined to wonder regretfully 
at my course, should lack any explanation which I 
can give him. 

With all good wishes, I am 

Very truly yours, 
George William Curtis. 

The last literary work of Mr. Curtis, outside of 
his regular tasks, was the editing of " The Corre- 
spondence of John Lothrop Motley." ^ It was a 
work of much labor and some delicacy, owing to 
the strong feeling aroused in Mr. Motley and his 
friends by the circumstances of his resignation of 
the mission to Austria, and of his retirement from 
1 New York : Harper & Bros. 2 vols. 1889. 



312 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

the English mission. The brief statement made 
by Mr. Curtis in the preface may well be pondered 
by editors generally : "In preparing (the letters) 
for publication, the editor has withheld whatever 
he believed that the writer's good judgment and 
thoughtful consideration for others would have 
omitted. This rule excludes comments upon per- 
sons and affairs which, however innocent or play- 
ful, might cause needless pain or misapprehension. 
It excludes, also, much of the repetition which natu- 
rally occurs in such letters, and a large part of the 
domestic and friendly messages and allusions which, 
although illustrating the writer's generous sympa- 
thy and affectionate disposition, are essentially 
private. If much of such matter is still left, it is 
because, with all his interest in literary pursuits 
and in public affairs, Mr. Motley was essentially 
a domestic man, and a more rigid exclusion could 
not have been made without injustice to his char- 
acter. Otherwise the letters are printed as they 
were written." 

The last public address of Mr. Curtis was that 
on James Russell Lowell, first delivered in Brook- 
lyn, February 22, 1892, and repeated in New York 
in May. In it he said : — 

" Like all citizens of high public ideals, Lowell 
was inevitably a public critic and censor, but he 
was much too good a Yankee not to comprehend 
the practical conditions of political life in this 
country. No man understood better than he such 
truth as lies in John Morley's remark : ' Parties 



THE TYPICAL INDEPENDENT. 313 

are a field where action is a long second best, and 
where the choice constantly lies between two blun- 
ders.' He did not therefore conclude that there is no 
alternative, ' that nought is everything and every- 
thing is nought.' But he did see closely that, while 
the government of a republic must be a government 
by party, yet independence of party is much more 
vitally essential in a republic than fidelity to party. 
Party is a servant of the people, but a servant who 
is foolishly permitted by his master to assume sov- 
ereign airs, like Christopher Sly, the tinker, whom 
the lord's attendants obsequiously salute as mas- 
ter: — 

" * Look how thy servants do attend on thee, i 

Each in his office ready at thy beck.' 

To a man of the highest public spirit like Lowell, 
and of the supreme self-respect which always keeps 
faith with itself, no spectacle is sadder than that 
of intelligent, superior, honest public men prostrat- 
ing themselves before a party, professing what they 
do not believe, affecting what they do not feel, 
from abject fear of an invisible fetich, a chimera, a 
name, to which they alone give reality and force, ^ 
as the terrified peasant himself made the spectre 
of the Brocken before which he quailed. 

'' With his lofty patriotism and his extraordinary 
public conscience, Lowell was distinctively the In- 
dependent in politics. He was an American and a 
republican citizen. He acted with parties, as every 
citizen must act if he acts at all. But the notion 
that a voter is a traitor to one party when he votes 



814 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

with another was as ludicrous to him as the asser- 
tion that it is treason to the White Star Steamers 
to take passage on a Cunarder. When he would 
know his duty, Lowell turned within, not without. 
He listened, not for the roar of the majority in the 
street, but for the still small voice in his own 
breast. For, while the method of republican gov- 
ernment is party, its basis is individual conscience 
and common sense. This entire political independ- 
ence Lowell always illustrated. 

" Whatever his party associations and political 
sympathies, Lowell was at heart and by tempera- 
ment conservative, and his patriotic independence 
in our politics is the quality which is always un- 
consciously recognized as the true conservative 
element in the country. In the tumultuous excite- 
ment of our popular elections, the real appeal on 
both sides is, not to the party, which is already 
committed, but to those citizens who are still open 
to reason, and may yet be persuaded. Li the most 
recent serious party appeal the orator said : ' Above 
all things, political fitness should lead us not to for- 
get that at the end of our plans we must meet face 
to face at the polls the voters of the land, with bal- 
lots in their hands, demanding as a condition of the 
support of our party, fidelity and undivided devotion 
to the cause in which we have enlisted them. This 
recognizes an independent tribunal which judges 
party. It implies that, besides the host who march 
under the party color and vote at the party com- 
mand, there are citizens who may or may not wear 



THE TYPICAL INDEPENDENT. 315 

the party uniform, but who vote only at their own 
individual command, and who give the victory. 
They may be angrily classified as political Laodi- 
ceans ; but it is to them that parties appeal, and 
rightly, because, except for this body of citizens, the 
despotism of party would be absolute, and the re- 
public would degenerate into a mere oligarchy of 
bosses." 

When, in the letter to the San Francisco corre- 
spondent above cited, Mr. Curtis wrote, " I am an 
Independent," it was the standard of independence 
described in his characterization of Lowell that 
he had in mind. He was very faithful to that 
standard, and the trials of his fidelity were more 
severe, intimate, and lasting than those of Lowell. 
" Literature," he said of the latter, " was his pur- 
suit, but patriotism was his passion." Of Curtis 
it may be said that patriotism was both his passion 
and his pursuit, to which literature was constantly 
and with no small sacrifice, nor witliout pangs of 
reluctance, but constantly, subordinated. He was 
not only for thirty years a political journalist, but 
he was a political speaker, and an active partici- 
pant in party effort. While his devotion to the 
purposes of the Republican party was the main- 
spring of his work in and for that party, his long 
years of unremitting and systematic activity in it 
wove about him numberless strong ties of sym- 
pathy, association, and memory. These were not 
easily severed nor severed without pain. He was 
the most conspicuous instance of his time of the 



316 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

Independent who, without hope of reward or gain 
and at such a cost, followed the orders of his con- 
science. This, as I have said, I regard as his 
greatest service to his country, and as a service of 
inestimable value. For the independence of Mr. 
Curtis was not narrow, or obstinate, or ignorant, or 
conceited. Of that kind there is no lack. It is, 
to a certain order of mind, not merely easy but at- 
tractive. The conscience which Mr. Curtis obeyed 
was enlightened and open. He was as careful, pains- 
taking, and critical in seeking to know the right as 
he was firm and determined in support of what he 
finally decided was for him the right. And he 
was, so far as I have been able to see, singularly 
respectful of the same sort of independence iu 
others. His indignation at hypocrisy and self- 
seeking in public life was a flame as steady as it 
was hot ; but toward honest difference of judgment 
— honest in the formation as in the expression — 
he was not merely tolerant, he was frankly and 
sincerely respectful. His great gifts, for which he 
had or made great opportunity, made his career 
an example of far-reaching and lasting influence ; 
and I think it may with reason and justice be said 
that the influence was, without qualification, pure 
and good. 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

CHANCELLOR OF THE UNIVERSITY. 

The work of the Board of Regents of the Uni- 
versitv of the State of New York, to which Mr. 
Curtis had been elected in 1864, and of which he 
had thought so little when he was a member of the 
Constitutional Convention that he had tried to 
have the Board abolished, was greatly changed 
when in 1888 Mr. Melville Dewey, of New York, 
became its secretary and executive officer with a 
residence at the state capital. The many and vari- 
ous and sometimes conflicting laws regulating the 
authority and functions of the regents were codi- 
fied, rendered consistent, and in some degree modi- 
fied. The powers, which for the greater part had 
been either misunderstood or neglected, were now 
found to be considerable, and with the energetic 
management of Mr. Dewey, the board became a 
living organization, with possibilities of great 
achievement, and with steady and rapid progress 
in actual accomplishment. The original purpose 
of the board, when created, was the establishment 
and conduct of a university that should be the 
crown of the system of education in the State, to- 
wards which all other institutions should be guided, 



318 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

and the standard of which should be at all stages 
kept in mind. To serve this end the regents 
were given the right of inspection of all incorpo- 
rated institutions of learning, with power to issue 
certificates based on their own examination. By 
the firm and skillful use of these powers, by estab- 
lishing a carefully devised standard for the grant- 
ing of certificates, by an admirable plan of graded 
and uniform examinations, by thorough, intelligent, 
and systematic inspection and records, the regents' 
certificates were given so high a value as to be in- 
dispensable. Thus on the one hand all the edu- 
cators in the State were made to desire the ap- 
proval of the regents, and on the other hand 
their active and beneficial cooperation was secured. 
After a very great amount of labor, performed in 
an exceedingly short time, the original purpose of 
the board was in the direct way of being accom- 
plished, and its standard was recognized and con- 
trolling. In addition to this work of the regents, 
its influence upon the professional schools of law 
and medicine was steadily strengthened ; the State 
Library, which had previously been little more 
than a constantly growing heterogeneous mass of 
books, was reduced to order, and so classified and 
arranged as to admit of indefinite expansion and 
of corresponding usefulness ; while, by various 
means, its treasures were made available over the 
whole State, and local school libraries were multi- 
plied. The scientific collections of the State were 
reorganized, brought under one general control, 



THE TYPICAL INDEPENDENT, 319 

made mntually more useful, and their development 
provided for. In all this work Mr. Curtis, who 
became Chancellor of the University in 1890, took 
not only the greatest interest, but a large part. 
Recognizing the special knowledge and gifts of 
Mr. Dewey, he gave to him the heartiest and most 
appreciative support; but, while he felt the im- 
pulsion of " such a steam engine " (as, in one of 
his letters, he called the secretary), he was not in 
the habit of shifting responsibility, and sanctioned 
only what he carefully understood in principle and 
in all essential practical features. The tax of this 
unpaid and inconspicuous though honorable work 
upon his time and strength was considerable ; but 
he was fortunate to see its results so far achieved, 
and its methods so firmly established and so effec- 
tive, as to constitute a satisfying reward. The fol- 
lowing notes from Mr. Dewey explain the relation 
of Mr. Curtis to their work, and to those associated 
with it : — 

'•' My admiration for Chancellor Curtis grew 
with every occasion of personal contact. Of his 
public and private life I can only say that I share 
in the universal admiration. As chancellor of the 
University, however, he was known to me as to no 
one else. From the time he took office, January 
30, 1890, his interest in our work, and his faith in 
the splendid future before it, grew constantly. At 
our last interview he emphasized this more strongly 
than ever before, and was looking forward to our 
immediate future with a confidence which, with all 



320 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

my enthusiasm, came to me as a new inspiration ; 
for I felt, when one so careful and conservative as 
Mr. Curtis had, after twenty-eight years of service 
as a regent, looked through our plans and our re- 
cent development and felt so fully satisfied as did 
he as to our future, that we, who were too much at 
the heart of the work to see it with the perspec- 
tive of one at a little distance, ought to be well sat- 
isfied with the verdict. 

" Mr. Curtis was exceedingly conscientious in re- 
gard to all his official duties, but was entirely free 
from that spirit which often, in conscientious men 
occupying supervisory positions, becomes so embar- 
rassing to administrative officers. He watched all 
our work with great care, and criticised or made 
suggestions with absolute freedom ; but he held 
that those who were giving their lives to this office, 
and night and day were in its atmosphere and 
studying its interests, should be trusted as far as 
practicable with all details of administration. His 
course was a golden mean between that of those 
perfunctory officials who sign their name to any 
kind of a document placed before them by assist- 
ants or subordinates, and who take the honor with- 
out assuming the responsibility, and that of the 
similar officials at the other extreme who so often 
cripple the best work by insisting on projecting 
their own personal equation into the work of sub- 
ordinate officers of a totally different type of mind. 
He seemed always to deal with us as he would 
like to be dealt with under like circumstances ; and 



THE TYPICAL INDEPENDENT. 321 

I can recall no case, In these happy years of official 
association with him, in which he has not recog- 
nized to our entire satisfaction our right to shape 
minor details as we found best in our daily work, 
though he always faithfully and intelligently in- 
sisted on knowing that the general principles and 
policy of the department were observed. Nothing 
in my life has been so satisfactory to me as Mr. 
Curtis's statement last January that he was per- 
fectly satisfied to have his name stand at the head 
of our publications and stationery, as responsible to 
the public for the character of the work that we 
were doing in the University offices. He always 
seemed to read between the lines, and to under- 
stand clearly the spirit in which our work was done, 
without making it necessary to call his attention to 
our devotion to duty, or to the unselfish interest in 
the University work which is so marked a feature 
of nearly every prominent member of our staff. I 
need hardly say that in the office each one felt that 
he had lost a personal friend ; and each one real- 
ized how great was the public loss when he was 
gone who in so unusual a degree at once fully dis- 
charged his responsible supervisory duties, and yet 
left to the working officers that sense of freedom 
from every unnecessary interference without which 
the highest and best work is never done." 



CHAPTER XXV. 

CONCLUSION. 

In writing the life of Mr. Curtis as an " Ameri- 
can Man of Letters," I have not forgotten his 
claim to such a designation, though I have tried to 
give, as nearly as possible within the limits of the 
book, the materials for an estimate of his course as 
a man of public affairs. As has been suggested, 
had he devoted himself to letters only, or were he 
known only by his literary work, his reputation in 
that kind would have been more distinct and might 
be more lasting. The extent of his writing was 
great. The Easy Chair alone, were the monthly 
papers continued for nearly forty years collected, 
would form some thirty volumes of the size of the 
present one. His addresses, from which three 
large volumes have been selected, could easily have 
supplied at least twice that number. All his work 
was carefully and conscientiously done, most of it 
with more trained critical discrimination than was 
given to the half dozen volumes of essays and travel, 
and the novels that are commonly accepted as his 
" works." Of the Easy Chair especially it must be 
remembered that it was the chief product of Mr. 
Curtis's pen, was wrought in the pure literary spirit, 



CONCL USION. 323 

and was, as much as the work of any prose-writer of 
his time, literature. It suffers now from the ephem- 
eral form of its publication. Even the collected 
essays in their dainty form, and with the light 
device from "The Tatler" with which the author 
introduces them, " I shall from time to time Ke- 
port and Consider all Matters of what Kind soever 
that shall occur to me," still suggest the fleeting 
interest of a monthly appearance and disappearance. 
Nor can it be denied that Mr. Curtis himself had 
little confidence in their permanent interest, and 
was with difficulty persuaded by his publishers to 
select those that were put into a volume before 
his death. I doubt, indeed, whether he would have 
done so, had he not had access to the collection of 
his friend, Mr. Pinkerton, who had faithfully gath- 
ered and bound them all. But an author is not 
the most trustworthy critic of his own work, and 
it is not to be inferred that Mr. Curtis was not 
from first to last scrupulously attentive, in these 
essays, to a very high standard. The form in 
which they were originally given to the public, so 
far from relaxing his sense of responsibility, rather 
kept it active. He had a constant and strong im- 
pression of the very great number of readers whom 
he reached, and of the peculiar function performed 
by the magazine in the American family. He knew 
that to thousands of these families, with eager, in- 
terested, curious minds, with active intellectual im- 
pulses, but with scant opportunity or time for what 
is generally known as culture, the magazine was 



324 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

what its name implied, — their store of literature. 
His wide and long-continued experience in lectur- 
ing, covering as it did all the free States and ex- 
tending over more than a quarter of a century, 
brought him intimate knowledge of the classes 
who composed the readers of the magazine. He 
knew their needs, their mental appetites, their as- 
pirations ; he knew very well also their limitations, 
and he regarded them as entitled in every way to 
his best work. His best he certainly gave them. 
There is something slightly pathetic and wholly 
beautiful in the spirit of the Easy Chair toward 
this curious clientele. It is absolutely free from 
any taint or suspicion of condescension. Through 
the hundreds of essays there is manifest a simple, 
loyal, unaffected respect for the readers. There is 
not even any invidious elimination of subjects that 
might easily be supposed to be "caviare to the 
general." Poetry, art, music, letters, the higher 
politics, take their place freely and naturally be- 
side social satire and reminiscence and anecdote. 
I have spoken of the writings of Mr. Curtis in 
" Harper's Weekly " as a kind of talking in which 
the editor had the air of speaking face to face with 
his readers. From the Easy Chair there was 
talking also, and the candor, the high courtesy, the 
unfailing self-respect that expresses itself in re- 
spect for others, which are qualities of the best 
talking, are manifest. Indeed, no other style could 
so easily have borne so varied a burden. The 
writer who sets out to produce a volume on philo- 



CONCLUSION. 825 

sophy, literature, morals, history, society, or any 
defined phase of them, finds his hand subdued to 
that he works in, and his writing, though satisfy- 
ing or delighting those interested in his particular 
topic, may easily repel those who are not, or may 
weary them, or leave them indifferent. But when 
a man of rich and highly-trained mind, a wide 
reader, a vigorous and alert thinker, with a vivid 
and sustained interest in a great range of differ- 
ently interesting subjects, permits you to listen as 
he talks, ripely but with leisure, sometimes pro- 
foundly but always genially, you get from him 
something of his best in whatever direction his 
thought may turn. This is what one gets of Mr. 
Curtis in the Easy Chair, and what has made that 
series of essays, during the long years of their reg- 
ular production, a unique and charming and very 
important contribution not only to American liter- 
ature, but to the development and formation of 
national opinion and sentiment. 

In Mr. Curtis the man of letters and the orator 
were blended. The more important of the orations 
were written out and read, though they did not 
seem to the hearer to be read. Some of them 
were committed to memory, but the memorizing 
was complete and the delivery without hesitation, 
so that in each case the personal impression of 
the orator was the same, and the impression 
was very strong. The matter was prepared 
with the audience constantly in mind, and no- 
thing was neglected which could arouse or hold 



826 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

them ; but the essential thing with the orator was 
the substance, the thought, which the form must 
serve. Mr. Curtis's conception of the function of 
the orator can be gathered from the range of his 
subjects as described in previous pages, and from 
the extracts given. It is pleasantly illustrated by 
the following notes of a conversation with him fur- 
nished me by one of his associates in '^ Harper's 
Weekly : " — 

" When I was in Washington," said Mr. Curtis, 
" I used to see much of Senator Conkling, and we 
spent many evenings together. Upon the whole I 
liked him, in spite of the defects which no one who 
came into communication with him could overlook. 
I remember one talk with him about eloquence, in 
which he naturally considered himself a connois- 
seur. After we had discussed it abstractly for a 
while, he asked me for an example of what I called 
true and high eloquence. I repeated to him the 
peroration of Emerson's Dartmouth address^ which 
you of course remember, — ' Gentlemen, I have 
ventured to offer you these considerations upon the 
scholar's place and hope, because I thought that, 
standing, as many of you now do, on the threshold 
of this college, girt and ready to go and assume 
tasks public and private in your country, you 
would not be sorry to be admonished of those pri- 
mary duties of the intellect whereof you will seldom 
hear from the lips of your new companions. You 
will hear every day the maxims of a low prudence. 
You will hear that the first duty is to get land and 



CONCLUSION. 327 

money, place and name ! " What is this Truth you 
seek? What is this Beauty? " men will ask with 
derision. If nevertheless God have called any of 
you to explore truth and beauty, be bold, be firm, 
be true. When you shall say, " As others do, so 
will I ; I renounce, I am sorry for it, my early vis- 
ions; I must eat the good of the land, and let 
learning and romantic expectations go until a more 
convenient season ; " — then dies the man in you ; 
then once more perish the buds of art and poetry 
and science, as they have died already in a thou- 
sand, thousand men. The hour of that choice is the 
crisis of your history, and see that you hold your- 
self fast by the intellect.' It did not impress the 
senator much. He found it too tame and creeping 
a style, and I naturally challenged him in his turn 
for an example. He took an attitude, and in his 
most oratorical manner gave me an exordium that 
is in the school readers by an orator named 
Sprague, I think. It begins : ' Not many years ago 
where we now sit the rank thistle nodded in the 
wind, and the wild fox dug his hole unscared.' 
The senator's manner, the evident fervency of his 
belief in his masterpiece, and the contrast of it 
with Emerson's, all together were too much for 
me, and I broke out in a peal of laughter which I 
could not restrain. I fear Senator Conkling never 
quite forgave me that laughter." 

It is not without significance that in 1870, a 
quarter of a century after Mr. Curtis's life at 
Concord and the club evenings in Mr. Emerson's 



328 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

library, the former should have quoted from the lat- 
ter an example of what he regarded as " true and 
high eloquence." " We can have him once in three 
or four seasons " is Mr. Curtis's report of the lec- 
turing committee's view of Emerson. " But really," 
he adds, " they had him all the time without know- 
ing it. He was the philosopher Proteus, and he 
spoke through all the more popular mouths." If 
Mr. Emerson did not speak directly through the 
mouth of Mr. Curtis, who had too much of his own 
to say to permit of this, his influence was consider- 
able. Both were optimists, both idealists. That 
is to say, they believed in the best, that it was pos- 
sible ultimately to attain it, and imperative always 
to pursue it. Mr. Curtis brought this belief into 
fields of work very different from those of Mr. 
Emerson, who began his speaking in a pulpit, and 
never quite lost the sense of remoteness that the 
pulpit impressed upon his intense nature. But 
Mr. Curtis, when he had fairly found his work, and 
began to speak, not merely for what he had to say, 
but for the effect of what he should say, kept an 
idealism as lofty and an optimism as unflagging as 
those of Mr. Emerson, and in circumstances that 
tried them far more severely. From the time of 
the delivery of the address at the Wesleyan Uni- 
versity in 1856 to that of the Lowell address in 
New York in May, 1892, there was hardly a lec- 
ture or oration of Mr. Curtis that was not meant 
to set forth a high ideal, to apply it to some duty 
actually pressing, and to stir and strengthen the 



CONCLUSION, 329 

hearts of his hearers for the task the duty imposed. 
With this dominant tendency it would have been 
easy for a man with his unusual gifts as a speaker 
to become an agitator, with the narrowness and mo- 
notony that incessant agitation often brings. From 
this he was wholly exempt, not only through the 
variety of his intellectual sympathies and the 
thoroughness of his training, but by the constancy 
of his moral impulse. It was the near duty that 
enlisted him, and with the years ever new duties 
approached and claimed and received his zealous 
service. As to each of them the essential recti- 
tude of his nature imposed upon him not merely 
zealous service, nor yet merely careful preparation 
for such service, but deliberate judgment as to the 
duty itself. Zealous he was in the noblest and 
completest fashion, but never a zealot, not blind nor 
rash, nor obstinate nor conceited. He was as anx- 
ious to be right as he was determined in what, with 
an open mind, he had decided to be the right. The 
prevailing characteristic of his oratory became 
therefore not advocacy, though powerful and bril- 
liant advocacy there was throughout, but persuasion 
with that foundation of reason and fairness and 
candor which is essential to real and lasting per- 
suasion. 

In the immediate impression made by the oratory 
of Mr. Curtis his personality coimted for much. 
Not the intellectual and haughty grace of Wendell 
Phillips' presence, nor the massive features and com- 
manding figure of Charles Sumner, weighted with 



330 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

conscious dignity, corresponded more completely 
to the style of their utterance than did Mr. Curtis's 
peculiar beauty to his. His charm was felt the 
moment he rose. His form was manly, powerfully 
built, and exquisitely graceful. His head was of 
noble cast and bearing; his features were well 
marked, and in his later years almost rugged ; finely 
cut, but of the type that is not blurred or effaced 
within the range of an audience. His forehead 
was square, broad, and of vigorous lines ; his eyes 
of blue-gray, large, deep-set under strong and 
slightly shaggy brows, lighted the shadow as with 
a flame, now gentle and glancing, now profound 
and burning. His voice was a most fortunate 
organ, deep, musical, yielding without effort the 
happy inflections suited to the thought, clear and 
bright in the lighter passages, alternately tender 
and flute-like, ringing like a bugle or vibrating in 
solemn organ tones that hushed the intense emotion 
it had aroused. His gestures were very few and 
simple. There was nothing of the " action " that 
the trained orator of the old school studied so care- 
fully; no effort to sustain the attention of the 
audience, as Everett did, with a skill that an actor 
might envy ; none of the restless and irrepressible 
movement, which in Beecher responded to the rush 
and torrent of his eloquence. The speaker seemed 
absorbed by the expression of his thought, unheed- 
ing the eyes, seeking the judgment and the heart, 
of his auditors. 

" I see now," wrote Hawthorne in 1851 to Mr. 



CONCL US ION. 331 

Curtis on the appearance of the " Nile Notes," 
"that you are forever an author." And an au- 
thor Mr. Curtis was to the last. If he did not 
cling to the usual forms of authorship, he was con- 
tinually under the spell of the literary spirit ; and 
he gave to all his productions unstintingly and 
almost unconsciously that which makes books lit- 
erature, — absolute and loving fidelity to the best 
thought. His addresses are full of his love of 
scholarship and of the fruits of that love, and his 
ideal of the citizen was the citizen who regarded 
and performed his duties as a scholar should. He 
was not insensible — on the contrary, he was 
keenly sensitive — to the charm of form, studied 
it, delighted in analyzing it, and strove for it with 
unfailing zest. He was a most delicate and acute 
critic of literary style, and, though he wrote rela- 
tively little on this subject, there was nothing more 
enjoyable than his discussion of it in conversation, 
when his talk illustrated, in its rhythmical flow, its 
vivid and luminous play, some of the rarest attri- 
butes of style. But the style he admired, and which 
he early formed and steadily developed, was that 
which, according to the Buffon tradition, " is the 
man." Literature was to him the record of the 
best, and it was the best that he sought in it ; it was 
the best also that he tried, modestly but with affec- 
tionate constancy, to contribute to it. Literature 
as a source of enjoyment he did not underestimate, 
but his deepest enjoyment was in its substance and 
in the inspiration itjbreathed into his life. For the 



332 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

mere daintinesses of letters he had little taste ; and 
the over-refinement which is, as it always has been, 
the ambition of small minds or the weakness of 
larger minds, aroused in him only an amused pity. 

His mind, even in its earliest and most fanciful 
production, was essentially vigorous and sane, of a 
fibre as firm as it was fine. And this quality was 
developed by his education, as in a sense it de- 
termined it. He was not a college-bred man, but 
he was severely trained in most that gives college 
breeding its advantage. He was a careful student 
in many directions, though an independent one. 
His knowledge of German, of French, of Italian, — 
which he rarely betrayed in his writing, — was not 
only sound but delicate, and on his lips these lan- 
guages had the graceful ease and certainty of inti- 
mate acquaintance. The fact is significant of his 
intellectual methods, of their thoroughness and sys- 
tem, of which there is no severer test than mastery 
of tongues not habitually used. His reading was 
wide, as any reader of his works can see, but he 
was habitually chary of quotations. He had a 
sound memory, though not a particularly ready one. 
His mind was assimilative, and seemed more and 
more so as time passed. It would not be difficult 
to trace in literature the wide and varied springs of 
his thought and style, but they would appear as 
elements blended and incorporated and made his 
own. 

His place in American scholarship was formally 
and amply recognized by th^ degrees conferred 



CONCLUSION. 333 

upon him, which, seeing that he was not a college 
graduate, and was enrolled in none of the well- 
defined professions, and had no specialty in letters, 
were remarkable in number and character. They 
were as follows : Hon. A. M., Brown, 1864, Madi- 
son, 1861, Rochester, 1862 ; LL. D., Madison, 1864, 
Harvard, 1881, Brown, 1882; L. H. D., Colum- 
bia, 1887. But with this quadruple right to the 
highest official literary rank, he remained always, 
save in the publications of the University of the 
State of New York after he became its chancellor, 
the plain editor and citizen. 

Mr. Curtis was intimately connected with the 
study and development of art in New York. He 
began his newspaper work by reviews of the exhi- 
bitions, and, though these do not now rank high as 
criticism, they were sound and helpful in their day, 
and based on what was then a very unusual degree 
of observation and knowledge. He always counted 
many artists among his friends, and of the truest 
as artists and as friends. He was one of the earli- 
est members of the Century Association, and used 
playfully to say that the only office he really as- 
pired to was that of president of the Century. In 
all gatherings of artists and lovers of art he was 
welcome and honored. He was for many years a 
trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and a 
trustee in fact as well as name. His taste in art 
was refined and catholic, not coldly critical ; and if 
he was not, and did not care to be, in the strict 
sense, a connoisseur, he was in the best sense, as 



334 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

used in the charter of his beloved Century, an ama- 
teur. 

Mr. Curtis was in his religious sentiments what, 
for lack of a more definite term, is called a Unita- 
rian. For many years it was his habit, when the 
Unitarian church on Staten Island was without a 
pastor, to read of a Sunday, from the pulpit, a ser- 
mon to the congregation. He was the vice-presi- 
dent of the National Unitarian Association ; and he 
not infrequently spoke, on questions involving the 
to him religious duty of the citizen, in the church 
of his friend, the Rev. John W. Chadwick, of Brook- 
lyn. It is needless to say that he was not a secta- 
rian, and that there was no taint in his mind of that 
narrowness and bigotry which are the peril of a 
belief rejecting much of what is most generally 
accepted. His creed remained that expressed in 
the simple statement written to his brother in early 
manhood, and quoted in the first chapter : "I be- 
lieve in God, who is love, that all men are brothers, 
and that the only essential duty of every man is 
to be honesty by which I understand his absolute 
following of his conscience when duly enlightened. 
I do not believe that God is anxious that men 
should believe this or that theory of the Godhead, 
or of the divine government, but that they should 
live purely, justly, and lovingly." 

A biography of Mr. Curtis, though it may con- 
vey to its readers some impression of what he did, 
and of the influence of his work and of his life, 
must necessarily fail to give any adequate impres- 



CONCL USION. 335 

sion of his personality as it was known to those 
who had the privilege of his intimacy, — those to 
whom love or friendship unlocked the treasures of 
his delightful nature. The picture which, to use 
a phrase frequently on his pen, " will be forever in 
the memory " of his friends, was not that of the 
orator, or of the leader in great causes, but that 
of the companion and friend. 

His tranquil and lovely home on Staten Island 
and the home in Ashfield among the remote hills 
of northern Massachusetts, bore to the busy and 
struggling city something of the relation that their 
master in his home bore to the man as he was 
known in the world of affairs in which he took so 
brave and strong a part. He was of a singularly 
simple and consistent nature. He had not, as 
some have, a different character at home and 
abroad, but rather a different manifestation of it. 
His talk was, on the whole, the best I have ever 
known. It was at once free and measured. He had 
great skill as a narrator, a natural skill, the fruit 
of keen and sympathetic observation and of hearty 
enjoyment of re-presentation. He had wit at times 
caustic, but never cruel or unfair or conceited, and 
always bright in itself and illuminating. He had 
humor of a generous and suave sort ; and he was 
capable, even in his latest years, of much of that 
play with the topic or the feeling of the moment 
which we recognize as "fun," though we cannot de- 
fine it, and which was almost riotous in his early 
letters. His love of music was constant, and, as a 



336 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

close friend writes, "his touch on the piano, his 
voice in singing, had a peculiar quality of sweet- 
ness." He smilingly adopted as to Wagner the 
remark he often quoted as to Emerson, of the 
Bostonian who " did not understand," but whose 
" daughter did ; " and he took a half -sportive delight 
in dwelling on the memory of the great singers of 
the past, of whom Jenny Lind was to him the su- 
preme type ; but his tribute to Theodore Thomas, 
at the farewell banquet to that apostle of Wagner, 
was a very noble tribute to the master as well. He 
had a gift in the nature of genius for hospitality 
and for friendship ; and it was a curious evidence 
of the richness and capacity of his nature that, 
amid strenuous duties and labors that were crowd- 
ing, exacting, and must have been often exhausting, 
he was able, not to find, but to make time for such 
generous social intercourse. He had the precious 
advantage of demanding and of giving in such in- 
tercourse only the substance and reality ; he did 
not despise, he simply ignored, the artificial require- 
ments. He was at home in all circles, because in 
all he was unaffectedly true to a nature constantly 
sincere and kind and simple, but a nature also 
opulent and varied, sensitive, sympathetic. His en- 
joyment of society, as of the outdoor world of art, 
of music, and of books, was a sort of talent which 
developed to the end, and did not wither or fail, 
and which he delighted to cultivate. I think one 
essential condition of it was his extraordinary un- 
selfishness. The irritation that is bred of vanity, 



CONCLUSION. 337 

jealousy, envy, the weariness and distrust that are 
the revulsion from the f everishness of unworthy de- 
sires, seemed impossible to him. He invited and 
won the best, because naturally and without con- 
straint he offered the best. It was due to this 
quality of his nature that it was possible to say of 
him, with reason and without exaggeration, that 
he was "the man of all Americans, perhaps the 
man in all the world, who was most widely held in 
affectionate regard, the most lovable and the most 
loved of all." The expressions of this sentiment 
after his death, from all parts of the land, from 
men of all parties and all classes, overbore even 
the expressions of sorrow. " Our tears must fall," 
said his friend, Mr. Norton, to those gathered in 
the little church at Ashfield, " that we are to see 
him no more ; but our hearts must be glad that his 
memory belongs to us forever, is part of ourselves, 
and will be to us a perpetual help and joy." And 
in the sorrowful first meeting of the executive com- 
mittee of the New York Civil Service Reform 
Association, Archdeacon Mackay-Smith closed a 
simple review of the character and service of the 
dead chief : '' We must believe that he who did this 
work and lived this life was very near to God." 

His last public utterance was in May, 1892, when 
he repeated in New York the Brooklyn address on 
Lowell. Early in the next month he was taken 
seriously ill, and after long and acute suffering, on 
the last day of the summer, in the quiet home on 
Staten Island, he died. A few days before the 



338 GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. 

end, a younger brother on parting asked if there 
was anything he could do for him. '' Nothing," 
was the answer, "but to continue to love me." 
The words seem his last message to those who knew 
him, and to the multitude of those who knew only 
his work. It has been constantly in my mind. 

" What is to be written," said a life-long friend 
of his when his death brought under discussion 
the preparation of a biography, " is the story of a 
character." It is the sense of his character that 
finally remains most distinctly, most firmly, with 
the most vital influence, from the contemplation of 
his life. Charm of many sorts he had, but the 
supreme and pervading one was the completeness 
with which he could render the charm of virtue, 
and the spontaneous and constant proof he gave 
that he was himself possessed by it. I have al- 
luded many times to this in the' course of this vol- 
ume, because it was manifested in so many phases. 
In public questions, from the early days when in 
his boyish letters he anticipated Charles Sumner's 
challenge to Webster to assume that leadership of 
the cause of the right which alone could give his 
genius its full scope, to the last noble and mournful 
tribute to Lowell as a leader of the conscience as 
well as the intellect of the nation ; in his brief but 
splendid campaign against slavery ; in the trying 
period of the Civil War ; in his long and patient 
efforts first to keep his party true to its best and 
then to reclaim it ; in the years of advocacy of re- 
form in the civil service as the cause of honest 



CONCLUSION. 339 

and pure public life ; in the unselfish and fruitful 
championship of political independence to which so 
much of his closing years was given, — in all these 
shone the high moral purpose of the man. In his 
literary work — after the books of travel which 
were his sole venture in a realm where imagina- 
tion was sovereign — under a thousand lights, in 
greatly varying forms, and associated with peculiar 
beauty of fancy, of construction and style, there 
was the same moral purpose. His rare gifts he 
brought, a rich and constant tribute, and laid them 
at the feet of the conscience which was to him the 
divinely appointed saviour of the world. 



INDEX. 



Addresses, Wesleyan University, 
1856, 111 ; Philadelphia, " Present 
Aspect of the Slavery Question," 
126 ; Chicago Convention, 1860, 134 ; 
on Civil Service Reform, 212 ; on 
Sumner, 236 ; at Concord, 239 ; 
Chamber of Commerce banquet, 
1876, 247; at Saratoga, 262; on 
Bryant, 265 ; as president of the 
National Civil Service Reform 
League, 294-307 ; on Lowell, 309. 

Alcott, at Brook Farm, 23 ; at Concord, 
31. 

Briggs, Charles F., editor of Putnam's 

Magazine, 82. 
Brook Farm, R. "W. Emerson on, 19 ; 

C. A. Dana, 22 ; influence on Curtis, 

26 ; sketch by Curtis, 27. 
Bryant, W. C, work before 1851, 55; 

oration on, 265. 
Burrill, Elizabeth (mother of G. W. 

Curtis, b. 1798, d. 1826), 6. 
Burrill genealogy, 2. 
Burrill, James, Jr., Chief Justice 

of Rhode Island, United States 

Senator, 6. 

Civil Service Reform, spoils system in 
Senate, 199 ; first commission, 216 ; 
abandonment by President Grant, 
239-244 ; National League formed, 
273 ; law of 1883, 275-278. 

Curtis, Ephraim, b. 1642, 2 ; Indian ex- 
pedition, 2 ; first settler of Worces- 
ter, 4. 

Curtis genealogy, 2, note. 

Curtis, George (father of G. W., b. 
1796, d. 1856), 6 ; married Elizabeth 
Burrill, 6 ; second marriage, 6 ; 
character, 6 ; president Bank of 
Commerce, 18; death (1856), 105. 

Curtis, George William, b. Feb. 24, 
1824, 6 ; religious creed, 7 ; school- 
ing, 8 ; life in Providence, 8 ; re- 
moval to New York, 18 ; work in 
counting room, 19 ; boarder at Brook 
Farm, 19; studies there, 20; life 
there, 20 ; described by a resident, 
21 ; Alcott's address, 23 ; Webster 
at Bunker Hill, 24 ; letter to father, 
24, 25 ; sketch of Brook Farm, 27 ; 



returns to New York, 29 ; studies, 29 ; 
life at Concord, 30 ; club, 31 ; letter 
on slavery, 1844, 32 ; sails for Europe, 
1846, 39 ; newspaper letters, 40 ; 
diary, 40-50 ; Genoa, 41 ; Florence, 
42 ; Rome, 44 ; the Pope, 45 ; return 
from Europe, 1850, 58 ; " Nile Notes, ' ' 
58 ; letter on, 62 ; estimate of, 65-73 ; - 
lectures, 74 ; on Tribune, 74; "Lotus- v 
Eating," 75; Fugitive Slave Law, 
letter on, 76 ; connection with Har- 
per & Bros., 77; "The Lounger," 
78 ; editor Putnam's Magazine, 78 ; 
verses, 79 ; " Life of Mehemet Ali," 
81 ; reminiscences by Parke Godwin, 
82 ; letters to Briggs, 84-91 ; at 
Cambridge, 86 ; at Newport, 87 ; 
" Potiphar Papers," Godwin on, 91 ; 
"Prue and I," Godwin on, 96; be- 
trothal, 102 ; marriage with Anna 
Shaw, 102 ; "Easy Chair," 1854, 104 ; 
death of his father, letter on, 105 ; 
business losses, 106 ; debts assumed, 
107 ; campaign of 1856, 109 ; address 
at Wesleyan University, Middle- 
town, Conn., Ill ; canvass of Penn- 
sylvania, 116 ; N. P. Willis' first vote, 
116; the home on Staten Island, 
birth of his son, 118 ; work on Har- 
per's Weekly, 120 ; " Trumps," 1859, 
121 ; mobbed in Philadelphia, 126 ; 
chairman of Republican County 
Committee, 130 ; discussion of can- 
didates for I860, 130 ; delegate to 
Republican National Convention, 
1860, 132; effective speech, 134; 
" Disunion, and God for the Right " 
(1860), 139; defense of Seward 
(1861), 140; birth of a daughter 
(1861), 144; New York "taken," 
145 ; events of 1861 and 1862, in let- 
ters to Norton, 148-160 ; Congres- 
sional Convention, 159 ; death of his 
brother. Col. Joseph B. Curtis, 1862, 
160 ; draft riots, 1863, 164 ; editor 
of Harper's Weekly, 169 ; estimate 
of work and methods, 170-177 ; visit 
to Lincoln, 178 ; Republican National 
Convention of 1864, 178 ; degree of 
LL. D., Madison University, 1864, 
181 ; Burnside, 182 ; nominated to 
Congress, 1864, 183 ; defeated, 184 ; 



342 



INDEX. 



reelection of Lincoln, 184 ; war lec- 
tures, 185 ; death of Lincoln, 188 ; 
a new paper proposed, — his views, 
189 ; Lowell's Commemoration Ode, 
192 ; delegate to Constitutional Con- 
vention, 192 ; Senatorship, 193 ; 
course in convention, 195 ; women, 
suffrage for, 196 ; impeachment of 
Andrew Johnson, 198 ; spoils system 
in Senate, 199 ; presidential elector, 
1868, 202 ; offered editorship of New 
York Times, 203 ; independent jour- 
nalism, 203; nominated for secre- 
tary of state and declined, 1869, 204 ; 
the nomination for governor, 207 ; 
lectures on Civil Service Reform , 212 ; 
appointment to Civil Service Com- 
mission, 1871, 216 ; report, 217-227 ; 
Liberal Republican movement, 1872, 
229; resignation from commission, 
232 ; sickness, 233 ; " bolting," 234 ; 
the reaction, 235 ; oration on Sum- 
ner, 236 ; oration at Concord, 239 ; 
Lowell's ode, 244 ; campaign of 1876, 
245; the disputed election, speech 
at Chamber of Commerce banquet, 
247 ; offered choice of chief mis- 
sions, 253 ; Lowell, minister to 
Spain, 255 ; attack by Roscoe Conk- 
ling, 257 ; conception of political in- 
dependence, 258 ; oration at Sara- 
toga, 262 ; oration on Bryant, 265 ; 
offer of German mission, 268 ; Inde- 
pendentRepublicanmovement, 1879, 
268 ; election of Garfield, 271 ; assas- 
sination, 273 ; Civil Service Reform 
League, 273 ; the Folger campaign, 
1882, 275 ; resignation from Harper's 
Weekly and its withdrawal, 274 ; 
Civil Service Reform law, 276 ; " The 
Blaine Campaign," the situation, 
279 ; action of Independent Repub- 
licans, 285; delegate to National 
Convention, 285 ; Blaine's nomina- 
tion, 287 ; support of Cleveland, , 
288 ; letter on, 289 ; good faith, let- 
ter on, 290 ; abuse received, 292 ; ad- 
dresses and labors as president of the 
Reform League, 294-307 ; canvass of 
1888, 308; letter on, 309; letters 
of Motley, 311 ; address on Lowell, 
312 ; Chancellor of the University 
of New York, 317-321 ; ideal of elo- 
quence, 326 ; Curtis as orator, 329 ; 
as writer, 330 ; honorary degrees, 
333; the Century Club, 333; reli- 
gion, 334 ; death, 337. 

Curtis, Henry, sailed from London, 
1635, 1 ; settled at Watertown, 
Mass., 1636, 2, note; children, 2, 
note. 

Curtis, James Burrill, b. 1822, 6 ; 
" Our Cousin the Curate," 12 ; de- 
scribed, 22. 



Curtis, John (b. 1707), 5 ; loyalist, 5 ; 

reconciliation, 6. 
Curtis, Joseph B., Col., 160, aote. 

Degrees: Hon. A. M., Brown, 1854, 
Madison, 1864, Rochester, 1862; 
LL. B., Madison University, 1864, 
Harvard, 1881, Brown, 1882 ; 
L. H. D., Columbia, 1887, 333. 

" Egyptian Serenade " (poem), 80. 
Emerson, R. W., 15 ; on Brook Farm, 
19. 

Fugitive Slave Law, letter on, 76. 

Godwin, Parke, Putnam's Magazine, 
82 ; reminiscences of Curtis, 82 ; on 
"Potiphar Papers," 91. 

Harper & Bros., Curtis's connection 
with, 77. 

Harper's Weekly, Curtis's contribu- 
tions to, 78 ; " The Lounger," 78 ; 
circulation, 120 ; resignation from 
and its withdrawal, 274. 

Hawthorne, at Concord Club, 31 ; work 
before 1851, 54. 

Howadji in Syria, 1852, 65. 

Howadji, Nile Notes of, 1851, 59 ; no- 
tices of, 60 ; censured, 61 ; letter on, 
62. 

Irving, Washington, 53. 

Lectures,, first, 74 ; War, 185 ; Civil 
Service Reform, 212 ; " The Public 
Duty of Educated Men," 1877, 258. 

Literary field in 1851, 52. 

" Lotus-Eating," 1852, 75. 

" Lounger," The, 78. 

Lowell, J. R., in 1851, 56 ; on " Prue 
and I " and " Potiphar Papers," 122 ,• 
letters to, 192, 209-211, 244, 255; 
address on, 312. 

"Nile Notes of a Howadji," 1851, 
59. 

Norton, Charles Eliot, letters to, 59, 
106, 116, 118-120, 136-138, 144, 145, 
146, 148, 162, 164-167, 177-182, 184, 
187, 189, 193, 194, 204, 207, 230, 231, 
233, 235, 245, 253, 257, 267, 275. 

" Potiphar Papers," Parke Godwin on, 
91 ; estimate of, 92-96. 

*'Prue and I," Parke Godwin on, 
96. 

Putnam's Magazine, Curtis editor of, 
78 ; contributors to, 81, note ; Charles 
F. Briggs, editor of, 82 ; Parke God- 
win, editor of, 82. 

"Reaper," The (poem), 79. 



INDEX. 



343 



Slavery, letter on, 1844, 32 ; letter on 
Fugitive Slave Law, 76 ; campaign of 
1856, 109 ; first address, Wesley an 
University, Middletown, Conn., Ill; 
canvass of Pennsylvania, 116 ; the 
Philadelphia mob, 126; emancipa- 
tion proclamation, 158. 

Spoils system in United States Senate, 
199. 

Suffrage for women, 196. 



Tariff, letter on, 1844, 35. 
Thackeray, estimate of, 78. 
Thoreau at Concord, 31. 
Tribune, The New York, Curtis's work 

on, 74 ; course changed, 148. 
"Trumps," 1859, 121. 

Webster, Daniel, at Bunker Hill, 24. 
Winthrop, Theodore, marches with 
the 7th regiment, 145 ; death, 146. 



amencan ^en of JLetterjs, 

Edited by Charles Dudley Warner. 



WASHINGTON IRVING. By Charles Dudley 

Warner, author of " In the Levant," etc. 

NOAH WEBSTER. By Horace E. Scudder, author 

of " Stories and Romances,"' " A History of the United States of 
America," etc. 

HENRY D. THOREAU. By Frank B. Sanborn. 
GEORGE RIPLEY. By Octavius Brooks Frothing- 

ham, author of " Transcendentalism in New England." 

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER. By Thomas R. 

Lounsbury, Professor of English in the Scientific School of Yale Col- 
lege. 

MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI. By Thomas 

Wentworth Higginson. author of '• Malbone," " Oldport Days," etc. 

RALPH WALDO EMERSON. By Oliver Wendell 

Holmes, author of " The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table," etc. 

EDGAR ALLAN POE. By George E. Woodberry, 

author of '' Studies in Life and Letters," etc. 

NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS. By Henry A. 

Beers, Professor of English Literature in Yale College. 

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN. By John Bach McMas- 

ter/author of •' History of the People of the United States." 

WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT. By John Bigelow, 

author of '' Molinos the Quietist," etc. 

WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS. By WiUiam P. 

Trent, Professor of English Literature in the University of the 
South, Sewanee, Tenn. 

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS. By Edward Gary. 

Other volumes to be mmounced hereafter. Each volume^ with 
Portrait^ 167710, gilt top, $1.2 j ; half 77iorocco, $2.jo. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, 

4 Park St., Boston; u East 17TH Sr., New York. 



''WASHINGTON IRVING." 

Mr. Warner has not only written with sympathy, mi- 
nute knowledge of his subject, fine literary taste, and that 
easy, fascinating style which always puts him on such 
good terms with his readers, but he has shown a tact, 
critical sagacity, and sense of proportion full of promise 
for the rest of the series which is to pass under his 
supervision. — New York Tribune. 

It is a very charming piece of literary work, and pre= 
bents the reader with an excellent picture of Irving as a 
man and of his methods as an author, together with ar 
accurate and discriminating characterization of his works 
'^^ Boston JournaL 

It would hardly be possible to produce a fairer or more 
candid book of its kind. — Literary World (London). 

"NOAH WEBSTER." 

Mr. Scudder's biography of Webster is aljke honorable 
to himself and its subject. Finely discriminating in ali 
that relates to personal and intellectual character, schol- 
arly and just in its literary criticisms, analyses, and 
estimates, it is besides so kindly and manly in its tone, its 
narrative is so spirited and enthralling, its descriptions 
are so quaintly graphic, so varied and cheerful in their 
coloring, and its pictures so teem with the bustle, the 
movement, and the activities of the real life of a by-gone 
but most interesting age, that the attention of the reader 
is never tempted to wander, and he lays down the book 
with a sigh of regret for its brevity. — Harper's Monthly 
Magazine. 

It fills completely its place in the purpose of this se- 
ries of volumes. — The Critic Q^^v^ York). 

''HENRY D. THOREAU." 

Mr. Sanborn's book is thoroughly American and trul) 
fascinating. Its literary skill is exceptionally good, and 
there is a racy flavor in its pages and an amount of exact 
knowledge of interesting people that one seldom meets 
with in current Hterature. Mr. Sanborn has done Tho- 
reau's genius an imperishable service. — A?nerican Church 
Review (New York). 

Mr. Sanborn has written a careful book about a curious 
man, whom he has studied as impartially as possible ■ 
whom he admires warmly but with discretion ; and the 
story of whose life he has told with commendable frank 
ness and simplicity. — New York Mail and Express. 

It is undoubtedly the best life of Thoreau extant. — 
Christian Advocate (New York). 



"GEORGE RIPLEY.'' 

He has fulfilled his responsible task with admirable 
fidelity, frank earnestness, justice, fine feeling, balanced 
moderation, delicate taste, and finished literary skill. It 
is a beautiful tribute to the high-bred scholar and gener- 
ous-hearted man, whose friend he has so worthily por- 
trayed. — Rev. William H. C han7ting (hondiOn). 

"JAMES FENIMORE COOPER.'' 

We have here a model biography. The book is charm 
ingly written, with a felicity and vigor of diction that are 
notable, and with a humor sparkling, racy, and never 
obtrusive. The story of the hfe will have something of 
the fascination of one of the author's own romances. — 
New York Tribmie. 

Prof. Lounsbury's book is an admirable specimen of 
literary biography. . . . We can recall no recent addition 
to American biography in any department which is supe> 
rior to it. It gives the reader not merely a full account 
of Cooper's literary career, but there is mingled with this 
a sufficient account of the man himself apart from his 
books, and of the period in which he lived, to keep 
alive the interest from the first word to the last. — New 
York Evening Post. 

"MARGARET FULLER OSSOLI." 

Here at last we have a biography of one of the noblest 
and the most intellectual of American women, which does 
full justice to its subject. The author has had ample 
material for his work, — all the material now available 
perhaps, — and has shown the skill of a master in his 
use of it. . . . It is a fresh view of the subject, and adds 
important information to that already given to the public 
— Rev. Dr. F. H. Hedge, in Boston Advertiser. 



** RALPH WALDO EMERSON.^' 

Dr. Holmes has written one of the most delightful 
biographies that has ever appeared. Every page sparkles 
with genius. His criticisms are trenchant, his analysis 
clear, his sense of proportion delicate, and his sympa- 
thies broad and deep. — Philadelphia Press. 



"EDGAR ALLAN POE.» 
Mr. Woodberry has contrived with vast labor to con 
struct what must hereafter be called the authoritative 
biography of Poe, a biography which corrects all others, 
supplements all others, and supersedes all others. — The 
Critic (New York). 



"NATHANIEL PARKER WILLIS.*' 

Prof. Beers has done his work sympathetically yet can- 
didly and fairly and in a philosophic manner, indicating 
the status occupied by Willis in the republic of letters, 
and sketching graphically his literary environment and 
the main springs of his success. It is one of the best 
books of an excellent series. — Buffalo Ti7nes. 

"BENJAMIN FRANKLIN." 

One of the most interesting and instructive volumes 
of the series. . . . The pictures which are given of the 
momentous period in which he lived are full of vigor, 
and betray an astonishing amount of research in many 
directions. --^j5'^j'/<9;/ Gazette, 

We have had many lives of Franklin, but none so ab- 
solutely impartial as this, and although it is short it omits 
no important fact that can help to reveal the man. . . . 
Mr. McMaster tells his story with extreme charm of 
narration. — Hartford Courant, 



"WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT.'* 

There were many aspects in which Mr. Bryant pre- 
sented himself as a subject for biography. He was a chief 
in the department of American journalism. He was a 
controlling power in American politics. He was also a 
man of letters in the pure and simple sense of the term. 
One might have known him well in either of these rela- 
tions and yet had no thought of the others. Mr. Bige- 
low has, it seems to us, done justice to all. — The Church- 
man (New York). 

"WILLIAM GILMORE SIMMS." 

As a biography it will rank with the best in the series. 
It is clear in style, full in statement of fact, impartial, 
discriminating and critical, and at the same time gener- 
ous and sympathetic. Professor Trent has performed a 
difficult task with rare discretion and good taste. — Chris- 
tian Union (New York). 

*^* For sale by all Booksellers. Sent, post-paid, on receipt 
of price by the Publishers, 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, 
BOSTON AND NEW YORK. 


















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